BV  4615  .R8  1901 

Rulison,  Nelson  Somerville, 

1842-1897. 
A  study  of  conscience 


A  STUDY  OF 
CONSCIENCE 


A  STUDY  OF 
CONSCIENCE 


BY 


The  Rt.  Rev.  Nelson  Somerville  Rulison,  D.  D. 

Late   Bishop  of   Central   Pennsylvania. 


PHILADELPHIA 

George  W.  Jacobs  &  Co. 

103-105  S.  Fifteenth  St. 


COPYRIGHT,    I9OI,    BY 

GEORGE  W.  JACOBS  &  CO. 


EXTRACT   FROM    THE   DEED   OF   TRUST   IN    ACCORD- 
ANCE WITH  THE  PROVISIONS  OF  WHICH  THE 
BALDWIN   LECTURES   WERE   INSTITUTED. 

"This  Instrument,  made  and  executed  between 
Samuel  Smith  Harris,  Bishop  of  the  Protestant 
Episcopal  Church  in  the  Diocese  of  Michigan,  of 
the  city  of  Detroit,  Wayne  County,  Michigan,  as 
party  of  the  first  part,  and  Henry  P.  Baldwin, 
Alonzo  B.  Palmer,  Henry  A.  Hayden,  Sidney  D. 
Miller,  and  Henry  P.  Baldwin,  2d,  of  the  State  of 
Michigan,  Trustees  under  the  trust  created  by 
this  instrument,  as  parties  of  the  second  part, 
witnesseth  as  follows : — 

"In  the  year  of  Our  Lord  one  thousand  eight 
hundred  and  eighty-five,  the  said  party  of  the  first 
part,  moved  by  the  importance  of  bringing  all 
practicable  Christian  influences  to  bear  upon  the 
great  body  of  students  annually  assembled  at  the 
University  of  Michigan,  undertook  to  promote 
and  set  in  operation  a  plan  of  Christian  work  at 
said  University,  and  collected  contributions  for 
that  purpose,  of  which  plan  the  following  outline 
is  here  given,  that  is  to  say : — 

"i.  To  erect  a  building  or  hall  near  the  Uni- 
versity, in  which  there  should  be  cheerful  parlors, 
a  well-equipped  reading-room,  and  a  lecture-room 
where  the  lectures  hereinafter  mentioned  might 
be  given ; 


THE  BALDWIN   LECTURES. 


"2.  To  endow  a  lectureship  similar  to  the 
Bampton  Lectureship  in  England,  for  the  estab- 
lishment and  defence  of  Christian  truth :  the  lec- 
tures on  such  foundation  to  be  delivered  annually 
at  Ann  Arbor  by  a  learned  clergyman  or  other 
communicant  of  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church, 
to  be  chosen  as  hereinafter  provided:  such  lec- 
tures to  be  not  less  than  six  nor  more  than  eight 
in  number,  and  to  be  published  in  book  form  be- 
fore the  income  of  the  fund  shall  be  paid  to  the 
lecturer; 

''3.  To  endow  two  other  lectureships,  one  on 
Biblical  Literature  and  Learning,  and  the  other 
on  Christian  Evidences:  the  object  of  such  lec- 
tureships to  be  to  provide  for  all  the  students  who 
may  be  willing  to  avail  themselves  of  them  a  com- 
plete course  of  instruction  in  sacred  learning,  and 
in  the  philosophy  of  right  thinking  and  right 
living,  without  which  no  education  can  justly  be 
considered  complete; 

"4.  To  organize'  a  society,  to  be  composed  of 
the  students  in  all  classes  and  departments  of  the 
University  who  may  be  members  of  or  attached 
to  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church,  of  which  so- 
ciety the  Bishop  of  the  Diocese,  the  Rector,  War- 
dens, and  Vestrymen  of  St.  Andrew's  Parish,  and 


THE  BALDWIN  LECTURES. 


all  the  Professors  of  the  University  who  are  com- 
municants of  the  Protestant  Episcopal  Church 
should  be  members  ex  oificio,  which  society 
should  have  the  care  and  management  of  the  read- 
ing-room and  lecture-room  of  the  hall,  and  of  all 
exercises  or  employments  carried  on  therein,  and 
should  moreover  annually  elect  each  of  the  lec- 
turers hereinbefore  mentioned,  upon  the  nomina- 
tion of  the  Bishop  of  the  Diocese. 

"In  pursuance  of  the  said  plan,  the  said  society 
of  students  and  others  has  been  duly  organized 
under  the  name  of  the  'Hobart  Guild  of  the  Uni- 
versity of  Michigan;'  the  hall  above  mentioned 
has  been  builded  and  called  'Hobart  Hall;'  and 
Mr.  Henry  P.  Baldwin  of  Detroit,  Michigan, 
and  Sibyl  A.  Baldwin,  his  wife,  have  given  to  the 
said  party  of  the  first  part  the  sum  of  ten  thou- 
sand dollars  for  the  endowment  and  support  of 
the  lectureship  first  hereinbefore  mentioned. 

''Now,  therefore,  I,  the  said  Samuel  Smith 
Harris,  Bishop  as  aforesaid,  do  hereby  give, 
grant,  and  transfer  to  the  said  Henry  P.  Baldwin, 
Alonzo  B.  Palmer,  Henry  A.  Hayden,  Sidney  D. 
Miller,  and  Henry  P.  Baldwin,  2d,  Trustees  as 
aforesaid,  the  said  sum  of  ten  thousand  dollars  to 
be  invested  in    good    and    safe   interest-bearing 


THE  BALDWIN  LECTURES. 


securities,  the  net  income  thereof  to  be  paid  and 
apphed  from  time  to  time  as  hereinafter  provided, 
the  said  sum  and  the  income  thereof  to  be  held  in 
trust  for  the  following  uses: — 

"i.  The  said  fund  shall  be  known  as  the  En- 
dowment Fund  of  the  Baldwin  Lectures. 

"2.  There  shall  be  chosen  annually  by  the  Ho- 
bart  Guild  of  the  University  of  Michigan,  upon 
the  nomination  of  the  Bishop  of  Michigan,  a 
learned  clergyman  or  other  communicant  of  the 
Protestant  Episcopal  Church,  to  deliver  at  Ann 
Arbor  and  under  the  auspices  of  the  said  Hobart 
Guild,  between  the  Feast  of  St.  Michael  and  All 
Angels  and  the  Feast  of  St.  Thomas,  in  each 
year,  not  less  than  six  nor  more  than  eight  lec- 
tures, for  the  Establishment  and  Defence  of 
Christian  Truth ;  the  said  lectures  to  be  pubHshed 
in  book  form  by  Easter  of  the  following  year,  and 
to  be  entitled  The  Baldwin  Lectures ;'  and  there 
shall  be  paid  to  the  said  lecturer  the  income  of  the 
said  endowment  fund,  upon  the  delivery  of  fifty 
copies  of  said  lectures  to  the  said  Trustees  or 
their  successors ;  the  said  printed  volumes  to  con- 
tain, as  an  extract  from  this  instrument,  or  in 
condensed  form,  a  statement  of  the  object  and 
conditions  of  this  trust." 


PREFACE. 


These  lectures  were  delivered  by  Bishop  Ruli- 
son  in  the  spring  of  1895.  At  the  time  of  his 
death,  he  was  preparing  them  for  publication. 
He  had  intended  rewriting  parts  of  the  lectures, 
but  was  unable  to  do  so,  and  they  are  now  pub- 
lished in  their  original  form.  The  concluding 
paragraphs  of  the  last  lecture  were  perhaps  never 
written  out,  as  they  were  not  to  be  found  among 
the  Bishop's  manuscripts,  and  in  order  to  com- 
plete the  argument,  a  conclusion  has  been  added 
which  it  is  hoped  is  in  keeping  with  the  thought 
and  spirit  of  Bishop  Rulison's  work. 


CONTENTS. 

Lecture      I. — The  Origin  of  the  Moral  Sense 13 

Lecture    IL — The  Reality  and  Power  of  Conscience.  35 

Lecture  IIL — Theories  of  the  Nature  and  Functions 

of  Conscience    51 

Lecture  IV. — The  Doctrine  of  Development  and  the 

True  Sphere  of  Conscience  73 

Lecture  V. — Moral  Responsibility  and  the  Author- 
ity of   Conscience    91 

Lecture  VL — The  Authority  of  the  Church  in  its 
Relation  to  Conscience  and  Indi- 
vidual Judgment in 


LECTURE  I. 
THE  ORIGIN  OF  THE  MORAL  SENSE. 


LECTURE  I. 

The  study  of  Origins  may  be  fairly  called  the 
characteristic  and  absorbing  study  of  philosophic 
minds  during  the  Nineteenth  Century.  The  plan 
of  this  study  has  been  to  observe  "how  things  are 
going  on"  in  the  hope  of  ascertaining  how  they 
began.  The  plan  is  admirable  and  the  prosecu- 
tion of  it  entirely  praiseworthy.  But  it  has  been 
the  misfortune  and  mistake  of  some  eminent  stu- 
dents to  confound  cause  and  result,  the  sign  and 
that  which  it  signifies,  and  too  hastily  and  illogic- 
ally  to  conclude  that  because  we  see  how  things 
are  going  on  now  we  know  they  must  always  have 
gone  on  in  substantially  the  same  way.  So  it  has 
come  to  pass  that  some  among  us  declare  the 
eternity  of  matter  only;  deny  the  existence  of 
spirit;  affirm  that  there  is  no  God  or  if  there  is 
He  is  unknowable,  (which  comes  to  the  same 
thing)  ;  assert  that  man  is  only  an  automaton 
moving  without  volition  at  the  pressure  of  some 
secret  spring,  and  regard  the  universe  with  all  its 
circling  worlds  as  a  kind  of  mecaniqne  celeste,  or 
a  fortuitous  concourse  of  atoms  of  soot,  pipe  clay 


l6  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

and  lime  flashed  out  of  some  ancient  fire-mist  or 
Aurora  Borealis,  and  shaken  together  for  a  mil- 
Hon  years  or  so,  and  thus  organized  by  the  pro- 
cess of  natural  selection  into  kingdoms  which  we 
call  animal,  vegetable  and  mineral,  that  grow  by 
chance,  and  move  without  purpose  and  go  on 
after  the  fashion  of  the  fancied  world  of  Epi- 
curus, which  some  power  was  supposed  to  have 
wound  up  and  set  spinning  like  a  top,  and  then 
left  to  spin  on  forever. 

Over  such  a  world  as  that,  there  could  be  no 
moral  Governor,  and  in  it  there  could  be  no  men 
having  a  sense  of  right  and  wrong  and  what  we 
call  a  conscience,  for  where  human  thoughts  and 
actions  are  determined  by  fate,  necessity  or 
chance,  there  can  be  no  moral  motive  and  choice 
of  the  will,  and  when  these  are  absent  there  can 
be  no  conception  of  right  or  wrong.  Such  a 
world,  if  there  could  be  one,  would  be  morally 
dead.  Fortunately  the  number  of  men  who  be- 
lieve in  either  the  possibility  or  the  reality  of 
its  existence  is  very  small  and  is  growing  smaller 
every  day. 

But  the  number  of  thoughtful  men  who  believe 
that  the  life  of  the  world  we  live  in  has  been  de- 
veloped out  of  a  few  original  germs  created  by 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  1 7 

the  Supreme  Being  by  the  process  of  natural  evo- 
hition  working  according  to  the  laws  of  natural 
selection  in  every  way,  is  very  large  and  is  daily 
growing  larger.  The  leader  of  this  great  com- 
pany was  during  half  a  century  Mr.  Charles 
Darwin,  and  their  philosopher  is  now  Mr.  Herbert 
Spencer.  Both  these  men  have  sought  to  solve 
the  problem  of  ethics  by  the  application  of  the 
laws  of  physics.  In  his  great  book  on  the  ''De- 
scent of  Man,"  Mr.  Darwin  suggests  an  explana- 
tion of  the  moral  sense  as  the  natural  development 
of  the  social  instincts  of  the  human  race  in  its 
lowest  state.  He  says :  "The  more  enduring  so- 
cial instincts  conquer  the  less  persistent  instincts. 
After  having  yielded  to  some  temptation,  we  feel 
a  sense  of  dissatisfaction  analogous  to  that  felt 
from  other  unsatisfied  instincts  called  in  this  case 
'conscience,'  for  we  cannot  prevent  past  images 
and  impressions  continually  passing  through  our 
minds;  and  these  in  their  weakened  state,  we 
compare  with  the  ever  present  social  instincts,  or 
with  habits  gained  in  early  youth  and  strength- 
ened during  our  whole  lives,  perhaps  inherited,  so 
that  they  are  at  last  rendered  almost  as  strong  as 
instincts."  "The  imperious  word  'ought'  seems 
merely  to  imply  the  consciousness  of  the  exist- 


l8  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

ence  of  a  persistent  instinct,  either  innate  or 
partly  acquired,  serving  him  as  a  guide,  though 
hable  to  be  disobeyed."*  Thus  conscience  is  but 
Httle  more  than  memory  and  the  moral  sense 
is  not  much  higher  than  the  instinct  of  the 
bird  or  dog.  Mr.  Spencer  has  placed  Mr. 
Darwin's  thoughts  in  philosophical  language  and 
has  sought  to  account  for  all  the  moral  intui- 
tions, aspirations,  hopes  and  fears,  and  the  con- 
cience  of  the  human  race  by  the  application  of 
the  same  law  and  principles  of  natural  evolution 
by  which  Mr.  Darwin  accounts  for  the  develop- 
ment of  the  animal  kingdom. 

But  the  philosopher  of  the  school  of  evolution 
is  neither  so  broadminded  nor  so  logical  as  its 
founder  and  great  teacher,  for  while  Mr.  Darwin 
not  only  allows  but  also  demands  a  few  germs 
created  by  God,  before  he  can  account  for  the  de- 
velopment of  animals,  Mr.  Spencer  requires  noth- 
ing for  his  supposed  development  of  moral  quali- 
ties but  experience,  inheritance  and  natural  selec- 
tion, and  with  conspicuous  unreason  supposes 
that  bodily  inheritance  and  experiences  of  pain 
and  pleasure  somehow  (no  one  knows  how),  be- 
come transmuted  into  a  sense  of  right  and  wrong, 

♦"Descent  of  Man,"  I.,  lOO. 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  I9 

and  so  degrades  conscience,  duty,  and  all  the  high 
moral  sentiments  of  mankind  to  no  diviner  origin 
than  the  dust  of  the  ground. 

The  gospel  of  the  Synthetic  Philosophy  is  at 
the  heart  and  core  of  it  "the  gospel  of  dirt,"  for 
it  is  of  the  earth  earthy.  Its  idea  of  our  own 
sense  of  right  and  wrong,  of  obligation,  duty, 
and  all  moral  sentiments  which  we  commonly  as- 
sociate with  conscience,  is  that  they  are  not  innate 
or  divinely  created  or  involved  in  human  nature, 
but  are  rather  derived  and  developed  from  hum.an 
experience  in  social  relations.  There  is,  there- 
fore, according  to  that  philosophy,  no  absolute 
right  or  wrong  among  men  who  are  (as  every- 
where men  are),  imperfectly  constituted.  There 
may  be  a  greatest  right  and  a  least  wrong  but 
the  quality  and  degree  of  each  depend  upon  the 
man's  nearness  to  a  perfectly  harmonious  envi- 
ronment. "Ideal  conduct,  such  as  ethical  theory 
is  concerned  with,"  Mr.  Spencer  says,  "is  not  pos- 
sible for  the  ideal  man  in  the  midst  of  men  other- 
wise constituted."* 

If  all  this  be  true,  then  it  follows  logically  that 
neither  Church  nor  State  has  the  right  to  expect 
or  demand  right  conduct  from  any  man,  and  the 

*Data  of  Ethics,  p.  280. 


20  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

only  justification  for  any  kind  of  penalty  is  that 
which  is  supposed  to  be  afforded  by  necessity  or 
fate,  and  which  may  be  formulated  in  the  words 
of  an  address  by  Mr.  Tyndall  some  years  ago, 
when  he  said  to  the  robber :  "You  offend  because 
you  cannot  help  offending  and  we  punish  you  be- 
cause we  cannot  help  punishing."* 

Such  a  theory  of  right  and  wrong,  that  has  no 
divine  sanction  and  no  deeper  and  stronger  basis 
than  that  of  experience  is  a  menace  to  modern 
society  and  to  all  that  men  hold  dear  the  wide 
world  over.  And  although  there  is  much  in  Mr. 
Spencer's  philosophy  that  is  sound  and  whole- 
some, yet  his  theory  of  moral  quality,  develop- 
ment and  obligation,  is  so  defective  and  danger- 
ous that  it  is  no  wonder  that  some  of  his  dis- 
ciples have  gone  farther  than  the  teacher  dared 
to  go,  and  have  carried  his  logic  to  its  necessary 
and  irresistible  conclusion,  that  might  is  always 
right,  and  robbery  is  no  wrong,  provided  the  rob- 
ber can  succeed  in  keeping  the  property  that  has 
been  stolen. 

That  this  is  no  wild  and  extravagant  assertion, 
is  witnessed  by  the  following  passage  taken  from 
a  cleverly  written  book  of  one  who  is  known  to 

*Reported  in  London  Times,  Oct.  i,  1890. 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  21 

be  a  scholar  of  the  evolutionist  school.  In  Mr. 
Wordsworth  Donisthorpe's  book  on  "Individual- 
ism/' he  discusses  the  philosophy  of  civil  law  and 
rights  and  among  other  revolutionary  doctrines, 
declares :  "The  all-sufficient  warrant  for  any  ef- 
fective governing  power  in  the  social  group  doing 
whatever  it  thinks  best,  is  the  welfare  of  the 
group.  Right  is  transfigured  might.  'Let  him 
take  who  hath  the  power ;  let  him  keep  who  can.' 
That  is  property,  is  it  not?  Suppose  the  many, 
it  will  be  asked,  finding  themselves  poor,  take  it 
into  their  heads  to  expropriate  the  few,  what 
then?  Well,  why  not?  If  it  can  be  shown  that 
robbery  of  the  rich  can  be  effected,  and  effected 
with  advantage  to  the  poor,  I  cannot  see  for  the 
life  of  me,  why  it  should  not  be  done.  It  is  con- 
trary to  morality  ?  But,  unfortunately,  hif aluting 
abstractions  'butter  no  parsnips.'  Besides,  I 
deny  it.  Morality  is  co-extensive  with  self  inter- 
est. If  anybody  disputes  that,  he  is  wrong.  It  is 
rude  and  dogmatic  of  me  to  say  so,  but  it  is  a 
short  answer,  and  I  am  not  going  to  discuss  the 
first  principles  of  ethics  here.  I  repeat  emphatic- 
ally, if  the  poor  and  the  many  can  see  their  way 
to  dispossessing  the  rich  and  the   few,  and  to 


22  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

reap  advantage  from  the  process,  then  they  have 
a  rght  and  a  duty  to  do  it."* 

Such  language  as  this  is  startling  indeed  to  all 
men  who  have  old-fashioned  ideas  of  morality, 
justice,  honesty  and  truth,  and  would  lead  most 
of  us  to  regard  its  author  as  a  fit  subject  for  either 
a  penitentiary  or  an  insane  asylum.  But  it  is  no 
more  than  the  logical  conclusion  of  a  system  of 
philosophy  that  gives  to  the  idea  of  duty  only  an 
''illusive  independence"  ;t  that  declares  "the  sense 
of  duty  or  moral  obligation  is  transitory  and  will 
diminish  as  fast  as  moralization  increases, "J  that 
''the  absolutely  right  in  conduct  can  be  that  only 
which  produces  pure  pleasure — pleasure  unal- 
loyed with  pain  anywhere — and  conduct  which 
has  any  concomitant  of  pain  or  any  painful  conse- 
quence, is  partially  wrong,"§  and  that  "acts  are 
good  or  bad  according  as  their  aggregate  effects 
increase  men's  happiness  or  increase  their 
misery."!  | 

Think  for  a  moment  of  what  this  doctrine  really 

*Pages  257  and  263. 
fData  of  Ethics,  p.  125. 
$Ibid,  p.  127. 
§Ibid,  p.  261. 
1 1  Ibid,  p.  40. 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  23 

means.  It  not  only  cuts  away  the  true  foundation 
of  morality,  but  it  also  dissipates  the  poetry  and 
charm  of  human  life,  degrades  its  best  concep- 
tions of  heroism  and  manly  virtue,  and  insults 
the  sublimely  sacrificing  Son  of  God,  who 
through  pain  and  mortal  agony  revealed  the 
eternal  character  of  God  and  gave  life  and  im- 
mortality to  men. 

*'No  act  producing  any  pain  can  be  absolutely 
right."  Will  such  a  statement  stand  before  the 
judgment  bar  of  thoughtful  men  as  either  sound 
morals  or  sound  philosophy?  Test  the  statement 
and  see. 

Only  a  few  years  ago  a  million  men  went  out 
from  their  homes  to  save  our  country  from  a 
threatening  danger  and  for  the  benefit  of  all  fu- 
ture generations.  Each  soldier  knew  perfectly 
well  that  he  was  taking  his  life  in  his  hands,  and 
yet  in  the  face  of  fire  and  blood,  he  felt  that 
America  and  his  own  conscience  expected  him 
to  do  his  duty,  and  thousands  died  in  awful  pain 
to  make  life  worth  living  for  their  fellows  in 
their  native  land.  Will  you  write  on  the  soldiers' 
monuments — "these  men  died  of  recklessness  or 
suicide,  and  their  acts  are  not  to  be  praised  or 
honored  because  they  were  done  in  pain?" 


24  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

Will  you  say  that  the  captain  of  that  German 
ship  that  sank  a  few  weeks  ago  with  its  precious 
freight,  in  the  water  of  the  cold  North  Sea,  was 
a  fool,  because  he  went  down  with  his  ill-fated 
vessel  and  did  not  try  to  save  his  own  life  before 
the  lives  of  the  ship's  passengers? 

Will  you  call  the  engineer  an  idiot,  who  in  the 
presence  of  certain  danger  and  the  possibility  of 
escaping  it  by  jumping  from  his  cab,  deliberately 
sets  his  face,  stays  in  his  engine,  stands  by  the 
lever,  sticks  to  his  sense  of  duty,  slows  the  tre- 
mendous train  and  saves  a  hundred  lives  at  the 
cost  of  making  himself  a  painful  cripple  for  all 
his  days  on  earth  ?  And  will  you  dare  assert  that 
his  conduct  was  not  absolutely  right  because  by 
it  he  suffered  pain? 

Here  is  a  noble  girl  who  amid  the  loneliness 
and  hardships  of  a  great  city  has  been  vainly  but 
cheerfully  giving  her  young  life  to  save  that  of 
her  mother,  and  now  in  her  dying  hour  expresses 
to  a  sympathetic  friend  her  feeling  that  her  life 
has  been  a  failure  and  that  she  will  have  nothing 
to  show  her  Master  in  the  last  day.  And  that 
simple,  wise  companion  gently  answers,  "I  think 
I  would  show  Him  my  hands,  if  I  were  you,  I 
am  sure  He  will  know."    Will  you  laugh  at  that 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  2$ 

gentle  speech  and  chide  the  dying  girl  because 
she  has  voluntarily  suffered  pain  and  given  her 
life  for  her  mother? 

On  a  green  hill  far  away,  between  two  crosses, 
hangs  the  divinest  man  the  world  has  ever  known. 
He  is  giving  His  life  for  the  world.  He  is  dying 
that  men  may  live  forever.  Will  you  stand  in 
thought  with  those  mistaken  men  and  add  your 
voice  to  their  sarcastic  cry,  "He  saved  others, 
Himself  He  cannot  save"  ?  Will  you  say  Christ's 
conduct  was  not  right  because  He  suffered  pain  ? 

How  can  any  one  save  another  without,  in  one 
sense,  losing  himself?  How  can  we  ever  become 
heroes  and  saints  and  noble  men  without  sacri- 
fice? And  how  can  we  ever  hope  to  be  saved 
here  or  anywhere,  intellectually  or  spiritually,  un- 
less we  suffer  discipline? 

The  philosophy  that  so  contradicts  the  common 
sense  as  well  as  the  moral  sense  of  mankind  does 
not  deserve  the  name  of  wisdom  and  is  the  enemy 
of  all  the  world  holds  dear. 

Such  teaching  as  this,  if  it  should  be  widely 
disseminated  and  generally  received,  would  de- 
teriorate human  character,  poison  our  home  life, 
destroy  business,  brutalize  social  relations  and 
degrade  the  race  to  a  condition  of  savagery  and 


26  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

animalism.  Life  would  not  be  worth  living  in 
an  utterly  selfish  and  wretched  world,  without 
God  and  without  conscience,  with  neither  love  nor 
hope,  where  the  strong  only  could  survive  and  the 
weak  must  perish,  and  where  to  all  alike  the  most 
welcome  call  would  be  the  old  Alexandrine  invi- 
tation to  supper  and  suicide. 

The  philosopher  of  this  earthly  school  of  ethics 
may  smile  at  this  picture  and  declare  there  is  no 
chamber  of  horrors  either  in  or  at  the  end  of  his 
system  of  thought.  He  may  even  argue  that  the 
moral  faculty,  however  it  originated,  has  now 
become  a  part  of  the  organic  structure  of  human 
nature  and  is  not  therefore  likely  to  be  displaced. 
He  may  point  to  himself  and  his  disciples  as  equal 
in  respect  of  truth,  honesty,  purity,  justice,  to 
men  who  hold  a  different  view  of  the  origin  and 
immutability  of  the  moral  sense,  and  may  then 
present  the  long  history  of  human  development 
from  confessedly  low  and  rude  conditions  to  its 
present  condition  of  strength  and  beauty. 

But  all  this  is  beside  the  mark.  The  question 
is  not  of  the  intentions  of  teachers  who  think  the 
sense  of  right  and  wrong  has  been  created  by 
heredity  and  experience  and  natural  selection. 
Nobody  doubts  their  good  intentions.     The  real 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  2^ 

questions  are,  Have  they  clear  eyes?  Do  they 
see  straight?  Have  they  followed  their  own 
logic?  Are  they  not  better  than  their  creed? 
With  many  men  about  many  things,  it  is  true  to- 
day as  it  was  eighteen  hundred  years  ago,  that 
seeing  they  do  not  perceive.  And  it  has  been  the 
ill  fortune  of  a  great  many  reformers  to  have  a 
thoroughly  good  conscience  with  a  wretchedly 
wrong  judgment. 

The  men  who  are  trying  to  put  in  place  of  the 
old  system  of  morality  with  its  alleged  divinely 
created  sense  of  right  and  wrong  or  what  we 
call  the  human  conscience,  something  that  is  con- 
fessedly not  divine,  but  rather  purely  human,  de- 
veloped out  of  and  by  man  himself,  are  doubtless 
devoted  to  a  search  for  truth.  Probably  it  would 
be  unreasonable  to  suppose  that  any  large  num- 
ber of  persons  who  have  been  educated  in  our 
homes  and  schools  and  churches  in  the  old  ideas 
of  a  divinely  given  sense  of  right  and  wrong  will 
immediately,  upon  their  being  told  that  con- 
science is  only  experience  or  the  influence  of 
heredity,  become  corrupt  and  criminal.  But  give 
them  time  to  think  over  the  difference  between 
the  old  and  new  ideas,  let  a  generation  or  two  pass 
and  then  look  at  their  vhildren  who  have  been 


28  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

taught  that  conscience  is  nothing  more  than  an 
organic  remembrance  of  their  ancestors'  experi- 
ence, that  duty  is  only  prudence  with  always  an 
eye  to  the  main  chance,  that  remorse  is  only  the 
vague  memory  of  some  ancestor's  misfortune, 
that  love  is  only  altruism  which  "must  in  several 
ways  be  more  limited  as  the  highest  state  is  ap- 
proached,"* that  honesty  and  justice  are  a  kind  of 
compromise,  and  that  right  is  only  transfigured 
might — I  say,  wait  until  all  this  is  thoroughly  be- 
lieved and  has  become  organized  in  human  char- 
acter as  its  exact  opposite  now  is,  and  you  will 
find  that  you  have  waited  for  nothing  better  than 
the  reign  of  anarchy  and  the  destruction  of  so- 
ciety. 

No  thoughtful  mind  can  fail  to  see  that  the 
problem  of  human  life  and  progress  is  becoming, 
under  the  influence  of  increasing  numbers  and 
growing  aspiration,  rivalry  and  competition,  at 
once  more  complex  and  more  difficult  of  so- 
lution. All  around  the  world,  men  feel  that 
in  the  chambers  of  their  blood  there  moves 
the  impulse  of  a  new  life.  Everywhere  it 
is  struggling  with  prevailing  conditions  for 
larger  possessions,   keener  pleasures,   and  wider 

*Data  of  Ethics,  p.  251. 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  29 

liberty.  It  is  doubtless  a  necessary  condition 
of  the  evolution  and  progress  of  society,  and 
ought  to  be  recognized  and  welcomed  by  all 
the  lovers  of  their  kind.  But  if  the  awakened  life 
is  not  rightly  taught  and  directed,  it  is  as  full  of 
fear  and  danger  as  it  is  of  hope  and  safety. 
Whether  the  mighty  explosives  w^hich  modern 
chemistry  has  produced  shall  be  used  to  tunnel 
our  mountains  and  mine  our  coal,  or  wreck  our 
industries,  and  kill  our  fellows,  depends  upon  the 
motive  and  education  of  the  men  who  use  them. 
Even  under  the  influence  of  the  moral  ideas  of  the 
world's  greatest  teachers  and  in  an  atmosphere 
that  is  saturated  with  the  principle  of  religion, 
multitudes  of  suffering  men  claim  to  find  no 
rational  sanction  for  existing  conditions  or  the 
hope  of  better  things.  How  much  less  of  hope 
and  reason  will  there  be  among  men  if  you  tell 
them  that  religion  is  a  fraud  and  conscience  a 
humbug,  and  the  sense  of  right  and  wrong  is 
but  nonsense  at  the  best ! 

When  any  large  number  of  men  talk  as  does 
Mr.  Belfort  Bax,  in  his  ''Religion  of  Socialism," 
then  society  is  near  its  dissolution.  "If  I  can 
evade  the  law  and  exclude  your  vigilance,  I 
have  a  perfect  right  to  do  so  and  my  success  in 
3 


30  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

doing  so  will  be  the  reward  of  my  ingenuity.  If 
I  fail  I  am  only  an  unfortunate  man.  The  talk 
of  dishonesty  or  dishonor,  where  no  moral  obli- 
gation or  duty  can  possibly  exist,  is  absurd.  You 
choose  to  make  certain  laws  to  regulate  the  com- 
mercial game.  I  decline  to  pledge  myself  to  be 
bound  by  them,  and  in  so  doing,  I  am  clearly 
within  my  moral  right.  We  each  try  to  get  out 
of  the  other  all  we  can,  you  in  your  way,  I  in 
mine.  Only,  I  repeat,  you  are  backed  by  the  law, 
I  am  not,  that  is  all  the  difference." 

Heaven  help  us  if  it  is.  And  if  it  is,  this  world 
would  be  a  better  world  if  it  were  like  the  moon, 
without  life  and  atmosphere,  cold  and  dead.  But 
the  real  difference  is  as  wide  as  the  heavens  and 
the  earth.  It  is  the  difference  between  civilized 
men  and  savages,  between  right  and  might,  be- 
tween conscience  and  impulse,  between  God  and 
the  devil. 

There  was  never  a  time  when  that  difference  so 
much  needed  recognition  and  accentuation  as  the 
present.  The  philosophy  which  is  teaching  the 
multitude  that  might  is  right  is  the  philosophy  of 
a  savage  world.  The  teaching  that  is  trying  to 
destroy  the  idea  that  conscience  speaks  with 
divine  authority  is  the  doctrine  of  devils.     And 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  3 1 

the  lesson  that  both  moral  and  physical  destruc- 
tion follows  close  on  the  track  of  a  denial  of 
eternal  right  is  the  lesson  of  long  ages  and  the 
broad  world. 

You  have  only  to  turn  your  gaze  toward  the 
land  of  Homer's  heroes  and  read  the  short  but 
splendid  tragedy  of  her  history,  from  the  time 
when  because  of  her  intellectuality  she  stood 
strong  and  pure,  to  the  hour  when  she  sickened 
and  died  of  the  leprosy  of  sin,  to  see  that  intel- 
lect without  holiness,  beauty  without  purity,  elo- 
quence without  conscience,  knowledge  without 
love,  and  education  without  character  are  but 
blossoms  whose  root  and  life  are  in  the  corrup- 
tion of  the  grave. 

The  Roman  story  has  the  same  lesson.  You 
have  only  to  look  at  the  land  of  the  Caesars  and 
the  Ciceros,  of  mighty  men  of  law  and  war,  to  see 
how  a  race  with  iron  blood  and  massive  brain,  a 
race  that  conquered  the  world  and  is  still  teaching 
it  by  the  classics  of  its  golden  age,  could  die  by  a 
moral  suicide  when  its  conscience  became  seared 
and  virtue  was  but  a  name. 

You  have  only  to  read  French  history  to  see 
how  a  nation  of  brilliant  men,  when  their  con- 
science becomes  blunted  and  their  sense  of  right 


32  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

and  wrong  becomes  blinded,  run  into  sensuality 
and  die  of  corruption.  And  you  need  only  ex- 
amine some  epochs  of  our  own  history,  to  see  that 
when  a  nation  or  any  part  of  it  grows  skeptical 
of  the  power  of  truth  and  honesty,  when  char- 
acter is  less  valued  than  money,  and  when  the 
sense  of  brotherhood  has  lost  hold  of  the  national 
conscience,  the  nation  will  enter  into  tribulation 
and  distress. 

To  make  a  people  stand  high  and  strong  and 
live  a  life  of  righteousness,  you  must  have  a 
moral  character  that  is  based  on  a  belief  in  God, 
in  the  conscience  created  by  Him,  and  in  a  sense 
of  right  and  wrong  that  will  hold  men  faithful  to 
their  moral  standard,  as  the  stars  keep  their 
courses  and  the  tides  obey  the  moon.  When  there 
is  any  doubt  on  this  point,  there  will  be  a  skepti- 
cism of  heart  and  life,  which,  given  time  enough, 
will,  like  a  moral  dry  rot,  wither  every  sweet  and 
tender  aspiration  of  human  nature  and  eat  out 
the  pith  and  marrow  of  all  true  manliness. 

It  is  because  of  the  tremendous  dangers  that 
threaten  every  human  interest  if  men  lose  their 
belief  in  a  divinely  given  sense  of  right  and 
wrong  and  drive  conscience  from  the  throne  room 
of  their  nature ;  because  there  are  so  many  vague 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE,  33 

and  defective  notions  held  among  men  concern- 
ing the  origin  and  authority  of  conscience;  and 
because,  whatever  we  may  think  of  it,  conscience 
is  always  with  us  here  and  will  be  hereafter, 
either  accusing  or  applauding  our  motives  and 
deeds,  that  I  have  made  it  the  subject  of  these 
Baldwin  Lectures.  The  majesty,  solemnity,  and 
tremendous  practical  importance  of  the  subject  is 
so  great  that  I  stand  before  it  with  that  reverent 
fear  which  the  traveler  feels  when  he  stands  with 
uncovered  head  in  that  wonderful  valley  of  our 
Western  World  before  El  Capitan.  But  whether 
"conscience  shall  make  cowards  of  us  all"  in  that 
other  and  lower  sense  of  fear,  will  depend  upon 
our  practical  judgment  and  life.  Let  us  remem- 
ber the  thought  of  one  whose  fame  was  broader 
than  the  land  he  lived  in : 

"There  is  no  evil  that  we  cannot  either  face  or 
flee  from,  but  the  consciousness  of  duty  disre- 
garded. A  sense  of  duty  pursues  us  ever.  It  is 
omnipresent  like  the  Deity.  If  we  take  to  our- 
selves the  wings  of  the  morning  and  dwell  in  the 
uttermost  parts  of  the  sea,  duty  performed  or 
duty  violated,  is  still  with  us,  for  our  happiness 
or  our  misery.  If  we  say  that  darkness  shall 
cover  us,  in  the  darkness  as  in  the  light,  our  obli- 


34  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

gations  are  yet  with  us.  We  cannot  escape  their 
power  nor  fly  from  their  presence.  They  are  with 
us  in  this  Hfe,  will  be  with  us  at  its  close ;  and  in 
that  scene  of  inconceivable  solemnity  which  lies 
farther  onward,  we  shall  still  find  ourselves  sur- 
rounded by  the  consciousness  of  duty,  to  pain  us 
wherever  it  has  been  violated  and  to  console  us 
so  far  as  God  has  given  us  grace  to  perform  it."* 

*Websters  Works,  Vol.  VI.,  p.  105. 


LECTURE  11. 
THE  REALITY  AND  POWER  OF  CONSCIENCE. 


LECTURE  II. 

As  it  is  often  easier  for  a  traveler  to  see  the  dan- 
ger that  lies  before  him  in  his  path  than  to  find 
a  way  to  escape  from  it,  so  it  is  easier  for  a 
teacher  of  morals  to  point  out  a  defective  and 
dangerous  moral  standard  than  to  surmount  all 
the  difficulties  that  surround  even  the  best  one 
known  to  men. 

Whatever  may  be  our  own  personal  convic- 
tions, it  is  simply  true  to  say,  that  in  the  greatest 
symposium  that  is  gathered  to-day  about  the  wells 
of  knowledge  in  the  field  of  mental  and  moral 
science,  there  is  hardly  any  question  more  hotly 
disputed  than  that  of  the  origin,  constitution  and 
functions  of  conscience.  One  of  our  own  greatest 
metaphysicians,  recently  gone  to  his  reward,*  de- 
clared not  long  before  his  decease,  that  ''the 
burning  philosophic  question  of  the  day  relates 
to  the  development  of  conscience." 

To  the  superficial  observer  this  does  not  seem 
to  be  true.  He  looks  out  upon  the  world  of  busi- 
ness and  he  sees  at  first  no  signs  of  such  a  ques- 

*Dr.  McCosh. 


38  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

tion.  Men  seem  to  be  tremendously  in  earnest 
about  something,  but  their  earnestness  and  activ- 
ity appear  to  be  engaged  in  the  effort  to  get  on 
in  this  world  and  not  to  get  up  into  any  higher 
realm.  In  the  business  world  the  chief  question 
and  the  one  that  underlies  all  others  and  makes 
them  all  wait  until  it  is  answered,  is  doubtless  the 
question  of  how  to  get  bread.  From  it  spring 
social,  industrial  and  political  difficulties  that  per- 
plex the  wisest  statesmanship  and  with  which 
education  and  philanthropy  grapple,  sometimes 
in  vain.  How  to  get  bread  for  all  and  enough 
for  all,  and  how  to  preserve  all  in  the  possession 
of  it,  is  as  some  one  has  said,  the  riddle  which  the 
Sphinx  of  Fate  puts  to  our  civilization  and 
which  not  to  answer  is  to  be  destroyed.  Men 
must  have  bread  or  they  die.  And  in  their  eifort 
to  get  it,  they  seem  to  be  chiefly  interested  in 
planting  and  reaping,  in  mining  and  manufactur- 
ing, in  mowing  machines  and  sewing  machines, 
in  ships  and  railroads,  steam  engines  and  electric 
light,  and  other  means  and  facilities  for  making 
what  we  call  money  to  feed  the  many  tongued 
hunger  of  men.  But  when  the  observer  looks 
closer  and  longer,  he  will  see  that  by  all  this 
stress  and  strain,  energy  and  activity,  rivalry  and 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  39 

competition,  the  world  workers  are  being  forced 
into  classes  that  are  bound  together  not  by  com- 
mon blood  and  brotherhood,  but  by  the  ties  of 
trad^  and  self  interest,  and  that  under  the  name  of 
unions  they  are  practically  fighting  each  other 
and  making  war  on  the  unity  of  society  and  the 
race.  And  so  sooner  or  later  the  business  world 
is  forced  to  front  the  question  of  what  is  my 
duty  to  my  neighbor,  which  is  evermore,  at  the 
heart  and  core  of  it,  a  question  of  conscience. 

And  when  our  observer  turns  away  from  the 
world  and  opens  his  half  blind  eyes  in  the  dim 
religious  light  of  the  Church  he  sees,  at  first  sight, 
no  sign  of  his  question  there.  The  Church,  he 
thinks  (we  are  often  told  so),  is  interested  chiefly 
in  dogmatic  enigmas,  theological  puzzles,  fossil- 
ized notions,  and  is  busy  with  forms  and  cere- 
monies, lights  and  vestments,  and  wherever  there 
is  unusual  life  and  emotion,  in  getting  what  men 
call  souls,  saved  or  guaranteed  to  be  saved  in 
some  far-oif  celestial  country  for  which,  accord- 
ing to  M.  Renan's  taunt,  they  neglect  the  terres- 
trial land  they  live  in.  But  when  the  cataract  is 
removed  from  this  observer's  eyes  and  he  sees 
things  as  they  are,  he  finds  that  in  spite  of  the 
many  faults  and  shortcomings  of  the  Church,  it 


40  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

has  after  all  given  the  world  nearly  all  its  large 
Universities  and  greatest  Charities,  and  that  it 
knows  what  it  has  always  taught,  that  Godliness 
is  profitable  for  this  world  as  well  as  for  the  life 
that  is  to  come.  And  then  he  sees  that  far  more 
than  all  other  organizations  of  men,  the  Church 
is  trying  to  solve  the  social  question,  by  the  ap- 
plication of  the  principles  of  the  Gospel  of  Christ 
which  is  intended  not  only  to  save  men  but  also 
man,  and  to  save  him  here  and  now  and  alive. 

And  when  this  observer  turns  to  the  world  of 
science  and  learning  he  finds  his  first  impression 
as  misleading  as  before.  In  this  realm  the  study 
of  material  phenomena  seems,  indeed,  all  absorb- 
ing. And  undoubtedly  it  is  true  that  there  are 
many  students  who  enter  the  presence  chamber 
of  the  King  and  turn  their  backs  upon  the  throne. 
They  are  men,  great,  it  may  be,  in  their  special- 
ties, but  because  they  have  dulled  by  disuse 
the  noblest  faculties  of  their  nature,  they  are  sim- 
ply incapable  of  seeing  things  that  are  invisible 
to  physical  sight.  These  look  coldly  out  through 
their  eyes  of  flesh,  and  ignoring  the  intuitions, 
wishes,  and  aspirations  of  the  human  heart,  see 
nothing  that  has  not  material  form,  and  foolishly 
fancy  that  force  must  exist  in  a  visible  shape. 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  4I 

And  then  because  God  cannot  be  found  in  cosmic 
vapor,  nor  seen  through  telescope  or  microscope, 
nor  resolved  by  spectrum  analysis,  and  is  not  a 
phenomenon  to  be  observed  and  definitely  ex- 
plained by  an  "experimentum  crucis,"  they  boldly 
declare  that  He  cannot  exist,  or  what  is  prac- 
tically the  same  thing,  that  we  cannot  know  Him. 

And  yet  every  step  in  this  line  of  study  leads 
irresistibly  to  the  certain  conclusion  that  behind 
all  phenomena  and  above  all  physical  force,  there 
is  a  Personal  Cause  who  is  and  must  be  invisible 
and  vastly  greater  than  any  result  that  is  evolved 
out  of  His  life  and  will,  and  that  men  who  have, 
as  all  men  do  have,  some  sense  of  right  and 
wrong,  are  responsible  to  Him. 

"Two  things,"  said  the  philosopher  Kant,  "fill 
me  with  awe ;  the  starry  heavens  and  the  sense  of 
the  moral  responsibility  of  man,"  and  our  Web- 
ster said  in  reply  to  the  question,  "What  is  the 
greatest  thought  that  ever  engaged  your  atten- 
tion ?" — "The  greatest  thought  that  ever  filled  my 
mind  was  that  of  my  personal  responsibility  to  a 
personal  God." 

If  men  say,  Ah,  but  there  is  the  crux ;  is 
there  any  God?     I  answer  Yes;  and  His  exist- 


42  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

ence  is  as  clearly  proven  as  the  existence  of  any 
force  known  to  men. 

No  one  doubts  that  there  is  a  force  in  nature. 
We  say  it  is  a  fact  that  needs  no  proof.  We  feel 
it  and  deal  with  it  every  day.  So  do  we  also 
know  there  is  mind  in  nature,  and  at  least  we 
need  no  proof  that  it  is  in  human  nature.  The 
one  must  be  accounted  for  as  well  as  the  other, 
and  in  the  last  analysis  will  be  accounted  for  ex- 
actly as  the  other  is.  If  force  has  somewhere 
its  great  first  cause,  so  has  mind ;  and  if  the 
cause  must  correspond  to  its  result  in  the  one 
case,  so  it  must  in  the  other.  The  presence  of 
thought  in  the  universe,  whether  in  what  we  call 
adaptation  in  nature  or  in  the  mind  of  man,  im- 
plies a  thinker,  and  that  implies  a  Personal  Being 
as  the  cause,  for  none  other  is  competent  to  pro- 
duce such  a  result.  To  ascribe  the  energies  of 
nature,  the  thought,  feeling  and  volition  of  man 
to  a  Supreme  and  Personal  Being,  is  a  perfect 
generalization,  and  is  supported  by  the  nature  of 
the  phenomena  before  our  eyes  and  the  common 
sense  of  the  world. 

If  one  says,  I  look  out  upon  the  world,  and  al- 
though I  see  force  surging  in  the  seas,  and  gleam- 
ing in  the  stars,  and  flashing  in  the  sunshine,  and 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  43 

shimmering  in  the  mist,  and  glowing  in  the  Hght- 
ning,  and  working  out  the  world's  great  work 
through  countless  ages  and  transformations,  yet 
I  see  no  personality,  and  therefore  I  do  not  know 
there  is  a  personal  God,  I  answer.  Look  again 
with  open  eyes,  not  now  at  the  great  cosmos  that 
seems  to  you  so  dumb  and  purposeless,  but  at 
this  micro-cosmos,  that  we  call  human  nature. 
No  man  doubts  his  own  personality.  Every  man 
knows  that  he  is  a  personal  being,  and  needs  no 
proof  of  what  is  so  self-evident.  But  if  that  be 
so,  then  whoever,  call  Him  God,  or  whatever,  call 
it  force,  made  you  and  me  with  our  undoubted 
personality,  must  have  at  least  as  much  personal- 
ity as  we  have. 

And  then  you  have  proved  the  existence  of 
God  and  by  the  scientific  method,  which  declares 
that  an  effect  can  never  be  greater  than  its  cause 
and  that  nothing  can  ever  be  evolved  out  of  a 
cause  that  was  not  first  involved  in  it.  And  this 
conclusion  is  not  in  the  least  invalidated  by  the 
dictum  of  a  philosopher  that  the  Infinite  cannot 
be  a  person.  We  are  not  talking  about  the  In- 
finite in  an  abstract  sense.  We  are  saying  that 
God  who  is  infinite  in  power  and  goodness  is  and 
must  be  a  person  because  His  children  possess 


44  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

personality,  and  there  is  no  contradiction  eitlier 
in  the  conception  or  the  statement  that  the  Great 
First  Cause  can  have  no  Hmitations  except  the 
law  of  His  own  Being.  Nothing  is  plainer  to 
common  sense  than  the  truth  that  if  personality 
came  out  of  that  Being  personality  must  be  in  it. 
God,  therefore,  has  at  least  as  much  personality 
as  man  has,  and  that  is  enough,  not  only  for  our 
argument,  but  also  for  His  provision  for  the 
world. 

But  in  finding  God  through  man  we  have 
found  more  than  we  looked  for.  The  man  is 
clothed  with  a  tissue  of  faculties  which  invest  him 
with  a  kind  of  divinity.  He  has  intuitions,  aspi- 
rations, wishes,  wants,  hopes,  longings  that  are 
as  real  as  rocks  or  cosmic  force.  He  has  a  feel- 
ing of  personal  responsibility,  duty,  obligation. 
He  has  a  set  of  graduated  faculties,  on  the 
throne,  or  behind  the  throne  of  which  rules  im- 
perially a  something  that  we  call  conscience.  It 
has  always  been  so.  The  consentient  voice  of  all 
history  testifies  to  the  reality  and  universality  of 
this  constantly  present  King  and  Judge  of  man's 
motives  and  deeds.  And  the  sense  of  oughtness, 
this  sublime  feeling  that  over  us,  like  the  vault  of 
heaven,     spreads    the   moral    law,    compels    our 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  45 

thought  with  resistless  force  toward  Him  who 
made  the  heavens  and  is  the  hght  and  hfe  of  the 
world. 

Conscience  itself  speaks  to  men  of  God.  The 
world  that  moves  on  the  outmost  circle  of  our 
planetary  system  was  discovered  by  the  wavering 
of  the  one  next  to  it.  That  perturbation  was  in- 
explicable except  on  the  theory  that  some  un- 
known world  was  attracting  it  across  millions  of 
miles  of  darkling  space.  So  these  movings  of  our 
spirits,  this  feeling  of  responsibility,  this  sense  of 
duty,  sin  and  shame  cannot  be  understood  unless 
we  believe  in  the  Divine  life  swaying  the  little 
lives  of  mortal  men. 

The  proof  of  the  reality  and  power  of  con- 
science is  plain.  It  is  in  every  history,  every 
literature,  every  age  and  every  man. 

You  may  stand  in  thought  in  the  old  Greek 
Pantheon,  and  looking  at  the  ancient  mythologies, 
you  will  see  behind  them  a  background,  vague 
and  nebulous,  it  may  be,  but  still  showing  the 
light  of  right  and  the  shadow  of  wrong,  and 
some  idea  of  moral  obligation  which  is  the  under- 
lying principle  of  conscience. 

When  you  begin  to  call  personal  witnesses, 
grand  old  Homer  will  testify  of  a  certain  awe  of 
4 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 


the  Supreme  Deity  and  a  longing  for  a  better  jus- 
tice than  earth  affords,  ^schylus  will  tell  you 
the  fabled  Furies  were  but  the  personifications  of 
the  terrors  of  conscience,  and  that  Prometheus 
Bound  bears  his  sorrows  patiently  because  of  a 
good  conscience  in  all  that  he  has  done.  Lucret- 
ius will  say  "the  scourge,  the  executioner,  the 
dungeon,  the  pitchy  tunic,  even  though  these  be 
absent,  yet  the  guilty  mind  anticipating  terror 
applies  the  goad  and  scorches  with  its  blows." 
Satiric  Juvenal  will  call,  ''Why  shouldst  thou 
think  that  they  have  escaped  whom  the  inward 
consciousness  of  guilt  agitates  with  amazement 
and  scourges  with  the  soundless  lash."  Plato 
will  lecture  you  in  ideas  of  supreme  good;  So- 
crates will  talk  to  you  about  unity  of  virtue  and 
a  conscious  immortality.  Aristotle  will  reason 
about  prudence  and  a  divinely  given  sense  of 
right  and  wrong.  Seneca  will  affirm  the  divine 
origin  of  conscience,  and  Cicero  will  declare  in 
magnificent  language,  that  the  Divine  law  which 
obliges  it  is  eternal,  immutable  and  binding  on  all 
nations  and  all  ages.  The  Fathers  of  the  early 
Church,  the  Schoolmen  of  the  Middle  Ages,  the 
reformers  of  the  sixteenth  century,  the  theolog- 
ians,  philosophers   and   poets   of   all   times   and 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  47 

schools  of  thought  will  add  their  testimony  to  the 
universality  of  conscience  and  even  the  modern 
evolutionist  will  declare  his  belief  in  it  and  give 
an  ingenious  theory  of  its  genesis. 

The  testimony  of  the  Bible  I  have  left  to  the 
last,  because  I  have  wished  to  show  that  the  exist- 
ence of  a  conscience  is  plainly  proved  by  the  evi- 
dence of  human  nature.  But  the  testimony  of  the 
Holy  Scriptures  to  its  reality  is  on  every  page. 
And  yet  the  word  is  seldom  used  in  the  Bible — 
not  once  in  the  Old  Testament,  although  as  Dor- 
ner  remarks,  "the  entire  economy  of  salvation  in 
the  Old  Testament  is  founded  on  the  conscience." 
In  the  New  Testament  the  word  is  found  a  few 
times,  but  in  both  Testaments  the  idea  is  on  al- 
most every  page."^ 

St.  Paul  implies  that  all  men  have  a  conscience ; 
that  they  always  have  had  one,  and  that  the 
heathen  or  those  who  have  no  other  law  will  be 
judged  by  it.  "If  a  man  know  his  doing  to  be  in 
harmony  with  the  law,  his  conscience  is  ayoMrj, 
xaXfj^  xaOapa'  aTtpodxo-Ko? ''  The  two  parts  of  con- 
science are  specified.  "If  his  doing  be  evil,  so 
also   is   his   conscience,   inasmuch   as    it   is   con- 

*I.  Peter  iii.,  16;  Heb.  xiii.,  18;  I.  Tim.  iii.,  9;  Acts 
xxiv.,  16;  Kcb.  X.,  22;  Tit.  i.,  15;  I.  Tim.  iv.,  2. 


48  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

ScioUSneSS    of    such    evil  so       (^novepa)     fiefiia^/ieuTj 

far  as  the  evil  deeds  shadow  themselves  in  it 
like  blots ;  or  xexaurrjpiaaiiivr)  SO  far  as  it  bears 
them  in  itself  ineradicably  and  indelibly  like 
brands."*  A  moral  verdict  of  approbation  or 
disapprobation  is  implied  in  the  words,  "Their 
conscience  bearing  witness  and  their  thoughts  ac- 
cusing or  excusing  one  another/'f  while  the  ex- 
pression, *'When  ye  wound  their  weak  con- 
science"J  seems  to  indicate  that  it  may  be  sick 
and  feeble,  needing  the  help  of  the  physician  and 
educator. 

The  illustrations  of  the  authority  and  punish- 
ment of  conscience  are  very  numerous  and  strik- 
ing in  the  Bible.  The  sounding  footstep  follows 
the  sinner  among  the  garden  trees  and  the  awful 
voice  cries  out,  ''Where  art  thou?"  He  has  slain 
some  mortal  body,  or  worse,  some  immortal  soul, 
and  conscience  calls,''Where  is  Abel  thybrother?" 
He  has  indulged  some  secret  sneer  or  unuttered 
blasphemy,  and  it  sternly  says,  ''Nay  but  thou 
didst  laugh."  He  has  stolen  from  some  neighbor 
secretly  and  the  command  to  confess  is  heard. 

*Dclitzsch,   Bib.   Psychology,   Bk.  3,  p.   165. 
fRom.  ii.,   15. 
$1.  Cor.  viii.,  12. 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  49 

"Tell  me  now  what  thou  hast  done."  He  has 
committed  some  mortal  sin  and  conscience  cries, 
"Thou  art  the  man."  He  has  got  another's  field 
by  fraud  and  murder,  and  when  on  his  way  to 
possess  it,  an  incarnate  conscience  confronts  him 
and  forces  him  to  cry,  "Hast  thou  found  me,  O 
my  enemy."  He  has  been  profane  and  blasphem- 
ous, and  while  his  knees  knock  together  and  his 
cheeks  grow  pale,  it  writes  in  flames  before  his 
eyes,  "Mene,  Mene,  Tekel,  Upharsin."  He  has 
delivered  the  Holy  One  into  the  power  of  men 
to  be  crucified,  and  while  he  washes  his  hands  in 
water  conscience  stains  his  soul  with  blood  and 
convicts  him  of  his  cowardice  and  sin. 

But  I  need  not  multiply  evidences  of  the  exist- 
ence of  conscience  in  man.  They  are  everywhere 
and  they  speak  with  no  uncertain  voice.  However 
materialistic,  or  optimistic  we  may  be,  or  wish  to 
be,  there  is  pervading  the  world  a  deep  undertone 
of  feeling  that  somehow  men  are  responsible  to 
a  Higher  Power  and  Person,  and  that  He  is 
judging  the  world  every  day  through  its  con- 
science, and  that  He  will  judge  it  in  His  own 
Person  by  and  by.  The  classical  writers  are 
full  of  this  thought.  The  nations  are  full  of 
it.    The   definitions  of   conscience  and  the  myth- 


50  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE, 

ology  of  the  Nemesis  may  vary,  but  the  core  of 
the  conception  remains  ever  the  same.  And  so 
now  and  hereafter  the  man  who  refuses  the  right, 
denies  the  good,  and  destroys  his  conscience  has 
and  will  have  to  confess,  "Alas!  Myself  am 
Heir';  while  the  man  who  obeys  his  conscience 
and  does  his  best  to  live  in  and  up  to  the  light  that 
has  been  given  him  is  making  heaven  and  living 
in  it  every  day. 


LECTURE  III. 

THEORIES  OF  THE  NATURE  AND  FUNCTIONS 
OF  CONSCIENCE. 


LECTURE  III. 

From  what  has  been  said  in  previous  lectures  we 
may  surely  say  that  conscience  is  a  great  world 
fact.  But  in  face  of  the  universal  testimony 
to  the  reality  of  its  place  and  power  in  human 
nature,  we  are  forced  to  confess  that  the 
opinions  of  great  thinkers  and  writers  concerning 
the  genesis,  nature,  authority  and  obligations  of 
conscience  are  variable  and  many  of  them  con- 
tradictory. 

Just  because  this  is  so,  the  fairminded  man  who 
has  sufficient  learning,  courage  and  patience  to 
examine  a  truth  on  all  its  sides  and  in  all  its  rela- 
tions, will  not  hastily  construct  a  theory  of  con- 
science out  of  his  own  head,  without  at  least  a 
glance  at  the  voluminous  literature  of  the  subject. 
If  we  have  not  become  fixed  in  the  opinion  that 
this  kind  of  study  is  but  a  vain  attempt  to  solve 
the  mysteries  of  what  a  witty  French  philosopher 
calls  the  second  part  of  metaphysics,  viz.,  ''that 
which  men  of  common  sense  will  never  know," 
we  shall  find  the  survey  interesting  and  profitable. 

Beginning  with  the  Bible,  which  is  the  Word 


54  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

of  God,  it  is  simply  true  to  say  that  it  formulates 
no  theory  or  philosophy  of  conscience.  It  would 
not  be  fair,  however,  to  infer  from  this  fact  that 
there  is  no  true  philosophy  of  conscience,  either 
in  the  word  or  the  mind  of  God,  or  that  men 
may  not  find  and  formulate  one. 

The  Bible  is  not  singular  in  respect  of  its 
silence  concerning  a  theory  of  this  great  subject. 
It  is  equally  silent  in  respect  of  the  philosophy 
of  the  inspiration  of  men  who  wrote  it ;  the  phil- 
osophy of  the  Incarnation,  Atonement,  Resur- 
recton,  Ascension,  and  the  Sacraments  of  Jesus 
Christ.  The  statements  of  the  Bible  are  concern- 
ed chiefly  with  facts  rather  than  the  philosophy 
of  them.  The  rationale  may  be  and  generally  is 
important,  but  it  is  never  so  important  as  the 
facts  themselves.  For  them  the  evidence  is  so 
strong  and  sure  that  there  is  left  no  room  for  de- 
nial or  doubt.  But  no  man  can  be  absolutely 
certain  that  he  has  the  full  philosophy  of  them, 
because  no  human  mind  can  fathom  the  depth 
of  the  Eternal  One.  The  finite  cannot  compre- 
hend the  Infinite,  and  in  the  problem  of  Divine 
reasons  there  is  always  some  quantity  unknown 
to  men. 

In  this   domain   of    philosophy,   this   "border 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  55 

land"  of  the  known  and  settled  faith,  "thinking 
minds  will  appreciate  and  reverently  and  con- 
scientiously use  the  freedom  which  is  accorded 
to  them,  but  they  will  not  carry  their  liberty 
over  into  the  realm  of  adjudicated  truth."* 

The  reality  and  universality  of  a  conscience 
in  man  may  be  regarded  as  a  closed  question ; 
the  philosophy  of  it  is  an  open  question. 

What  is  true  of  the  Bible  in  respect  of  its 
silence  on  the  subject  of  the  origin  and  authority 
of  conscience  is  also  true  of  all  the  old  classical 
and  philosophical  writings  on  the  subject.  They 
all  testify  to  the  reality  of  this  great  faculty  and 
power,  but  no  one  writer  attempts  to  account 
for  its  origin  or  to  define  its  essential  nature, 
authority  or  obligations.  There  are  plenty  of  in- 
dications in  the  oldest  books  known  to  us,  as  in 
the  Book  of  Job  and  in  the  books  of  ancient  peo- 
ples outside  of  Israel,  that  thoughtful  men  were 
struggling  to  solve  great  moral  problems,  even  as 
they  are  in  this  nineteenth  century.  But  no  one 
had  then  constructed  a  system  of  moral  science, 
and  men  were  blindly  feeling  after  truth  rather 
than  following  with  clear  eyes  its  clue  and  forc- 
ing it  to  appear  by  positive  logical  processes. 

*Pastoral  Letter,  House  of  Bishops,  1895. 


56  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

We  should  naturally  expect  to  find  in  the  volu- 
minous writings  of  the  early  Fathers  of  the 
Christian  Church  some  definite  statements  on  this 
subject,  for  much  of  their  preaching  was  ex- 
tremely practical  and  searching,  and  appealed 
strongly  to  the  conscience.  But  we  look  to  them 
in  vain  for  definitions  or  explanations  of  this 
power  with  which  they  were  continually  dealing. 
Some  writers  have  intimated  that  the  great 
Augustine  was  "timid  of  appealing  to  the  con- 
science lest  by  so  doing  he  should  appear  to  ad- 
mit any  sufficiency  in  human  nature  for  the  sup- 
ply of  its  own  defects."*  Other  Fathers  showed 
no  such  fear  and  yet  made  no  analysis  and  offer- 
ed no  explanation  of  the  phenomena  of  conscience 
to  which  they  so  frequently  appealed.  The  near- 
est approach  to  a  definition  is  the  declaration  of 
Tertullian,  "Obscured  it  may  be  because  it  is 
not  God,  extinguished  it  cannot  be  because  it  is 
from  God."  Beyond  this  there  is  little  that  can 
be  fairly  called  an  explanation  of  the  phenomena 
of  conscience. 

When  we  reach  the  time  of  the  Schoolmen, 
we  find  them  principally  engaged  in  formu- 
lating  a    system    of    casuistry,    which   we    now 

*Bampton  Lecture,  1869. 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  57 

call  a  ''department  of  ethics  dealing  with  cases 
of  conscience."  They  invented  the  distinction 
between  mortal  and  venial  sin,  and  their  whole 
philosophy  of  right  and  wrong,  which  has  be- 
come famous  or  infamous  under  the  name  of 
casuistry,  had  its  origin  in  that  distinction.  And 
yet  it  is  remarkable  that  these  men  who  were  dis- 
tinguished for  nothing  so  much  as  for  their  tech- 
nical logical  ability  and  their  tendency  toward 
a  microscopic  examination  of  subjects  that  en- 
gaged their  attention;  men  who  could  split  hairs 
on  the  shadow  of  a  shade  in  matters  of  casuistry ; 
who  could  furnish  almost  innumerable  trumpery 
reasons  for  either  the  doing  or  not  doing  of 
things  of  almost  infinitesimal  importance;  who 
found  their  chief  pleasure  in  some  of  the  most 
sickening  processes  of  moral  dissection  and  who 
made  it  their  boast  that  each  of  them  could  make 
his  own  reasoning  soul  a  corpse  (perinde  ac  Ca- 
daver, that  is  Loyola's  phrase),  without  feeling 
or  will,  utterly  dead  and  without  motion  except 
as  moved  from  without  by  the  will  of  his  super- 
ior,— I  say  it  is  amazing  that  men  like  these, 
constantly  engaged  with  questions  of  conscience, 
should  not  have  treated  the  subject  with  some  ap- 
proach to  the  scientific  method  and  with  some- 


58  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

thing  like  the  skill  and  accuracy  that  are  com- 
monly the  accompaniment  and  result  of  the  use 
of  that  method.  But  they  never  rose  to  such  a 
lofty  task.  The  best  they  did,  with  all  their 
logical  ability,  was  to  resolve  conscience  into  and 
to  distinguish  between  the  ''synteresis  or  the  in- 
ternal law  and  the  syneidesis  or  the  internal  ac- 
cuser, and  to  dispute  minutely  whether  consci- 
ence was  an  act,  a  habit,  or  a  power.* 

There  was  not  much  change  in  the  treatment 
of  the  subject  by  theologians  and  metaphysicians 
until  after  the  Reformation,  which  was  itself  the 
answer  of  a  clear  and  quickened  conscience  when 
the  judgment  of  the  Church  had  rejected  the 
false  doctrines  of  the  universal  jurisdiction  and 
supremacy  of  an  Italian  Bishop.  The  Renais- 
sance of  learning  had  made  it  possible  for  church- 
men to  use  for  the  determination  of  doctrinal  and 
ecclesiastical  questions,  the  historical  method, 
which  in  this  domain  is  the  only  scientific  meth- 
od. The  use  of  this  method  proved  beyond  the 
possibility  of  a  doubt  that  the  pretensions  of 
the  Italian  Church  to  supreme  authority  and  uni- 
versal jurisdiction  were  as  baseless  as  the  shadow 
of  a  dream,  there  being  nothing  in  the  acts  of 

*Bampton  Lecture,  1869. 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  59 

any  of  the  six  General  Councils  of  the  Church 
that  could  by  any  possibility  be  construed  in  fa- 
vor of  such  extravagant  assumptions.  The  voice 
of  history  being  one  and  consentient  against  such 
claims,  the  judgment  of  men  in  the  Church, 
rightly  educated  and  classified,  accepted  the  doc- 
trines and  polity  of  the  ancient  and  undivided 
Church  and  rejected  that  which  was  distinctly 
Roman  and  therefore  uncatholic.  And  then  con- 
science, true  to  itself  and  its  eternal  nature  and 
office,  commanded  that  men  should  be  true  to 
the  rule  which  their  judgment  had  accepted. 

The  Reformation  was  thus  the  direct  result 
of  the  working  of  the  human  conscience,  and  both 
in  England  and  on  the  Continent  the  Reformers 
constantly  asserted  the  supremacy  of  conscience 
over  merely  ecclesiastical  authority,  while  at  the 
same  time  they  asserted  the  supremacy  of  the 
Bible  over  every  man's  conscience.  Whatever 
may  be  thought  of  an  apparent  inconsistency  in 
these  two  principles,  the  result  of  their  applica- 
tion was  large,  conspicuous  and  far-reaching,  and 
led  among  other  things  to  a  reconsideration  of 
the  nature  and  authority  of  the  faculty  that  had 
shown  itself  capable  of  producing  such  results. 
Scholars  like  Hall,  Taylor  and  Sanderson  treated 


6o  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

the  subject  in  a  large  and  philosophical  way,  and 
endeavored  to  establish  the  authority  of  con- 
science as  the  whole  foundation  of  moral  right. 
The  treatise  of  Bishop  Sanderson  is  in  most 
respects  the  ablest  work  on  the  subject  ever 
written.  And  yet  it  is  true  that  his  literary 
style,  both  in  the  original  Latin  and  in  the 
recent  English  translation,  is  not  sufficiently 
clear  to  enable  the  average  reader  to  be  certain 
of  his  meaning,  and  that  he  utterly  fails  to  an- 
swer some  modern  objections  to  his  idea  of  the 
authority  of  conscience.  He  calls  it  a  faculty  or 
habit  of  the  intellect  whereby  the  mind,  by  a 
rational  process,  applies  its  innate  light  to  the 
discrimination  oi  moral  actions.  "Conscientia 
est  faciiltas  sive  habitus  intellectus  practice  quo 
mens  hominis  per  discursam  rationis  applicat  lu- 
men quod  sibi  adest  ad  particidares  suos  actus 
morales." 

After  him  a  school  of  skeptics  arose  in  which 
Hobbes  and  Locke  were  conspicuous,  and  these 
tried  to  sweep  away  all  distinctions  of  right  and 
wrong,  the  one  referring  them  wholly  "to  exter- 
nal laws,"  the  other  declaring  them  to  be  simply 
"modifications  of  bodil)^  good  and  evil."  These 
loose  ideas  vv^ere  reproduced  and  enlarged  in  the 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  6l 

writings  of  Mandeville,  the  chief  of  the  sensual 
school,  whose  pet  expression  was  that  ''private 
vices  are  public  benefits."  Under  this  influence 
morals  came  to  so  bad  a  condition,  that  even 
such  pronounced  free  thinkers  as  Lord  Shaftes- 
bury, Hume  and  Hartley  strongly  denied  the  con- 
clusions of  the  sensual  and  civil  schools.  Then 
More,  Hutchinson  and  Bishop  Butler  contended 
for  the  truth  that  conscience  is  a  faculty  given 
by  God  to  the  original  constitution  of  man. 

Bishop  Butler's  definition  is  probably  more 
widely  known  than  any  other,  although  to  many 
among  us  it  seems  utterly  inadequate  to  solve 
the  difficulties  that  surround  the  subject.  He 
says  it  is  a  "principle  of  reflection  by  which  we 
distinguish  between  and  approve  or  disapprove 
our  own  actions."  Reid  calls  it  the  "ethical  side 
of  the  general  sense  of  truth,  the  communis 
sensiis  which  remained  in  man  after  the  Fall." 
Hutchinson  regards  it  as  a  tendency  of  the  mind 
to  discern  the  beauty  of  virtue  or  the  deformity 
of  vice.  Adam  Smith  bases  it  upon  the  rela- 
tion of  the  heart  to  its  object.  Brown  calls  it  an 
emotion  awakened  by  action.  Cumberland 
finds  right  only  in  the  utility  of  human  ac- 
tion. After  these  another  class  of  writers 
5 


62  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

came  to  the  front  including  Bentham,  Tucker  and 
Paley,  the  last-named  of  whom  utters  the  amaz- 
ing words :  "On  the  whole  it  seems  to  me  either 
that  there  exist  no  such  instincts  as  compose 
what  is  called  the  moral  sense,  or  that  they  are 
not  now  to  be  distinguished  from  prejudices  and 
habits."  Jeremy  Bentham  was  the  real  founder 
of  the  Utilitarian  School,  whose  one  test  of  the 
rectitude  of  an  action  was  its  utility,  leaving  the 
question  of  utility  to  be  determined  by  the  rea- 
son. Then  came  Mackintosh,  Stewart,  Chalmers 
and  Whewell  whose  idea  was  that  conscience  is 
not  one  but  many  faculties.  "By  the  culture  of 
the  directing  and  controlling  faculties  we  form 
habits,  according  to  which  we  turn  our  attention 
upon  ourselves  and  approve  or  disapprove  what 
we  there  discern.  These  faculties  thus  cultivated 
are  the  conscience."  Alexander  Bain,  Herbert 
Spencer,  and  John  Fiske  tell  us  that  conscience 
is  developed  by  means  of  natural  selection  and  is 
therefore  a  variable  quantity.  Pascal  declares 
that  "conscience  is  one  thing  North  of  the  Pyre- 
nees and  another  South."  Mansel  and  Hamil- 
ton doubt  its  right  to  rule  the  other  faculties  of 
human  nature.  Matthew  Arnold  and  John  Stu- 
art Mill  are  agnostics  on  the  subject,  at  least,  as  to 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  63 

the  personality  of  the  Eternal  Power  that  al- 
ways stands  behind  conscience  and  without  whom 
conscience  could  have  no  real  authority,  while 
Martineau,  Jevons  and  Calderwood  give  to  the 
conscience  a  divine  voice  and  authority.  In  our 
land  Seabury,  Porter,  McCosh  and  Hodge  teach 
the  doctrine  of  the  supremacy  and  the  obligations 
of  conscience — supreme  in  its  own  sphere  and 
yet  obligated  to  be  rightly  informed. 

In  Germany  Leibnitz  and  Malebranche  make 
conscience  "an  innate  love  and  approbation  of 
what  is  right."  Delitzsch  calls  it  the  "law  within 
his  heart;"  Mosheim,  an  act  of  the  understand- 
ing; Reinhard,  a  tendency  to  follow  the  leading 
of  God;  Harless,  "an  inner  revelation;"  Baader 
and  Schubert,  privity  of  the  soul  with  the  omni- 
present, omniscient  God ;  Hoifman,  "the  self-evi- 
dencing of  God  in  man ;"  Schenkel,  the  source  of 
all  religious  knowledge ;  Rothe,  an  infallible  sub- 
jective instinct;  Fichte,  Hoffman  and  finally  Im- 
manuel  Kant,  the  greatest  German  and  philos- 
opher of  them  all,  teach,  in  Kant's  own  words, 
that  this  "wondrous  power  works  neither  by  in- 
sinuation, flattery  or  threat,  but  merely  by  hold- 
ing up  the  naked  law  in  the  soul,  it  extorts  for 
itself  reverence  if  not  always  obedience,  before 


64  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

whom  all  appetites  are  dumb  however  secretly 
they  rebel."    It  has  its  origin  in  God. 

This  historical  sketch  could  easily  be  made 
longer,  but  it  is  believed  that  reference  has  been 
made  in  it  to  most  of  the  leaders  of  philosophical 
thought  on  this  subject.  It  has  been  long  enough 
to  show,  among  other  things,  the  great  variety 
of  opinions  that  have  been  held  by  able  men,  and 
the  difficulty  of  forming  a  definition  of  conscience 
that  shall  be  at  once  clear  in  itself  and  satisfac- 
tory in  its  solution  of  the  difficulties  that  con- 
fessedly surround  the  subject. 

And  yet  a  definition  is  desirable  and  necessary 
for  clearness  of  thought  and  correctness  of  con- 
clusion. I  have  before  remarked  that  the  most 
famous  definitions  of  conscience  are  those  of 
Bishops  Butler  and  Sanderson.  The  latter  calls 
it  a  "faculty  or  habit  of  the  practical  understand- 
ing which  enables  the  mind  of  man  by  the  use 
of  reason  and  argument  to  apply  the  light  which 
it  has  to  particular  moral  actions."  I  humbly 
think  this  definition  is  obscure,  and  needs  an  in- 
terpreter to  tell  us,  first,  what  is  the  practical  un- 
derstanding as  distinguished  from  any  other 
kind;  secondly,  what  is  the  nature  of  the  Hght 
of  the  mind  referred  to ;  and  thirdly,  what  consti- 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  65 

tutes  a  moral  action.  Several  things  are  here  as- 
sumed and  not  proved,  and  the  faculty  called  con- 
science is  confounded  with  a  very  different  one, 
which  we  call  judgment. 

Bishop  Butler's  well-known  definition  is  not 
much  more  satisfactory:  "A  principle  of  reflec- 
tion by  which  we  distinguish  between  and  ap- 
prove or  disapprove  our  own  actions."  Here 
again  explanations  are  needed  of  the  "faculty 
of  reflection,"  and  even  when  they  are  given,  con- 
science will  seem  to  most  men,  under  this  defini- 
tion, the  same  thing  as  judgment.  But  if  it  be 
the  same  thing  as  judgment,  then  it  must  be  Uke 
tlie  judgment,  fallible,  erring,  weak,  sometimes 
self-conLradictory,  and  always  needing  educa- 
tion and  development.  If  that  be  the  real  condi- 
tion of  conscience  then  it  has  no  real  authority 
and  the  instincts  and  the  universal  sense  of  the 
human  race  have  been  imaginary  or  misleading. 

We  are  compelled,  therefore,  to  seek  some  defi- 
nition that  shall  at  once  satisfy  this  universal 
instinct  and  reconcile  conflicting  theories  con- 
cerning the  authority  of  conscience.  Believing, 
as  I  do,  in  the  tripartite  nature  of  man,  my  own 
definition  of  this  marvellous  power  is  as  follows : 

Conscience  is  a  divinely  implanted  principle  or 


66  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

faculty  of  man's  spiritual  nature,  giving  to  him 
the  apprehension  of  everlasting  rightness;  ena- 
bling him  to  perceive  the  difference  between  a  good 
intention  and  a  bad  one ;  compelling  him  to  dis- 
cern the  beauty  of  a  right  choice  and  the  ugliness 
of  a  bad  one ;  kindling  the  consciousness  of  his 
obligation  to  keep  the  law  which  his  will,  acting 
through  his  judgment,  has  voluntarily  chosen; 
approving  his  loyalty  or  condemning  his  disloy- 
alty to  that  law  and  the  dictates  of  his  most  en- 
lightened judgment,  and  filling  him  with  the 
sense  of  his  personal  responsibility  for  the  use 
of  all  his  powers  to  know  and  do  the  everlasting 
right. 

Conscience  does  not  choose.  It  simply  testi- 
fies to  the  rightness  or  wrongness  of  the 
choice.  The  choice  is  made  by  the  will,  and  the 
will  is  affected  by  the  judgment.  But  conscience 
is  not  judgment. 

Nor  yet  does  conscience  determine  what  is 
strictly  true  or  false.  If  you  say  it  does,  then 
you  make  both  parts  of  a  contradiction  true,  and 
truth  is  anything  that  a  man  fancies  it  to  be. 
For  conscience  has  been  keen  and  strong  and 
active  and  true  to  itself  in  multitudes  of  men  who 
have  held  different  opinions  upon  a  given  sub- 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  (fj 

ject,  and  have  died  for  their  convictions  because 
they  beheved  them  true  and  felt  themselves  bound 
to  die  for  conscience  sake. 

Conscience  does  not  determine  what  is  abso- 
lutely right  or  wrong.  If  you  say  it  does,  as  so 
many  persons  do,  then  the  same  old  difficulty 
confronts  you.  For  conscience  has  over  and  over 
again  testified  to  the  Tightness  of  an  action  in 
one  environment  and  the  wrongness  of  the  same 
action  in  another  environment.  And  it  has  done 
this  not  only  with  reference  to  matters  indiffer- 
ent in  themselves,  such  as  the  eating  of  herbs 
and  meats,  to  which  St.  Paul  makes  allusion,  but 
also  with  respect  of  human  conduct,  the  Tight- 
ness of  which  has  been  declared  to  be  the  same 
in  all  circumstances  by  the  revealed  will  of  God. 

It  is  because  of  this  apparent  variation  in  the 
testimony  of  conscience  as  seen  in  history,  and 
because  of  the  confusion  in  his  own  thought  of 
conscience  and  judgment,  that  Mr.  Herbert 
Spencer  says  in  words  that  have  been  quoted  in 
fancied  triumph  by  the  fool  who  says  in  his 
heart  there  is  no  God,  and  therefore  neither  right 
or  wrong — ''If  the  moral  sense  to  which  you 
appeal  possesses  no  inherent  veracity,  gives  no 
uniform  response,  says  one  thing  in  Europe  and 


68  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

another  in  Asia,  originates  different  notions  of 
duty  in  different  ages  or  races  or  individuals,  how 
can  it  afford  a  safe  foundation  for  an  immutable 
morality?"  These  high-sounding  words  show 
that  conscience  is  to  Mr.  Spencer  what  he  fancies 
God  is  to  all  of  us,  simply  unknowable.  At  least 
they  show  in  this  philosopher's  mind  the  same 
confusion  of  thought  that  is  seen  in  the  great 
majority  of  people  in  respect  of  this  subject. 
_£onscience  is  confounded  with  judgment.  But 
it  ought  not  to  be  so  confounded,  for  it  is  impos- 
sible that  conscience  shall  contradict  itself  and 
change  with  changing  circumstances  and  still 
have  any  authority  for  any  living  man.  If  there 
be  a  Divine  light  shining  in  the  mind  of  man 
it  may  not  be  supposed  to  be  snuffed  out  by 
every  changing  wind.  And  undoubtedly  there  is 
such  a  light.  Hear  the  description  of  it  by  an 
ancient  heathen  in  words  as  eloquent  as  were  ever 
written  by  uninspired  men: 

''This  lav/  is  right  reason,  agreeable  to  nature, 
diffused  among  all  men,  constant,  eternal ;  which 
serves  to  call  us  to  our  duty  by  its  commands 
and  to  deter  us  from  vice  by  its  prohibitions  and 
which,  although  it  moves  not  the  wicked  either 
by  its  commands  or  prohibitions,  yet  fails  not  of 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  69 

its  end  when  it  commands  or  forbids  the  good. 
In  this  law  no  change  can  be  made;  it  can  be 
neither  partially  repelled  nor  wholly  annulled. 
Neither  Senate  nor  people  can  release  us  from 
its  obligations.  It  is  its  own  expounder,  its  own 
interpreter.  It  will  not  be  one  thing  at  Rome, 
and  another  at  Athens,  one  thing  to-day,  and  an- 
other to-morrow,  but  eternal,  immutable  and 
binding  all  nations  and  all  ages,  it  will  be  one 
law ;  and  one  will  be  its  author,  arbiter  and  giver, 
God  the  Lord  and  Sovereign  of  all.  Whoever 
obeys  not  Him  flies  from  himself;  and  having 
scornfully  rejected  his  own  humanity,  suffers 
from  this  very  fact  the  greatest  punishment,  even 
though  he  escape  those  other  sufferings  which 
are  believed  to  exist"  (in  a  future  state).* 

This  splendid  passage  from  Cicero  for  which 
we  are  indebted  to  Lactantius,  is  in  reality  a 
powerful  description  of  the  law  of  conscience. 
But  it  is  one  of  our  misfortunes  that  while  we 
recognize  the  majesty  of  the  general  law,  and 
while  we  know  that  it  must  be  uniform  and  uni- 
versal in  its  application,  not  one  thing  at  Wash- 
ington and  another  at  Westminster,  not  only  for 

*Cicero,  in  Lactantius  De  Vero  Cultu.  Lib.  VI.; 
Sec.  8. 


yo  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

Christians  but  also  for  heathen,  it  is  extremely 
difficult  when  we  come  to  apply  it  to  practical 
life,  to  deduce  from  it  principles  of  actions  which 
are  not  embarrassed  by  doubts  and  exceptions. 
For  example :  Parents  are  to  be  honored  and  yet 
their  commands  are  to  be  despised  if  they  clash 
with  God's  commandments.  The  life  of  our 
neighbor  is  to  be  preserved  and  yet  there  are 
circumstances  which  justify  us  in  depriving  him 
of  it.  We  are  bound  to  keep  our  promise,  but 
not  if  the  fulfillment  of  it  requires  us  to  place 
a  revolver  in  the  hands  of  a  maniac.  The  more 
numerous  and  complicated  the  relations  and  cir- 
cumstances of  life,  the  more  difficult  it  is  to  ap- 
ply the  light  of  nature  to  our  conduct,  and  the 
easier  it  is  for  ignorance  and  rashness  to  plunge 
the  man  into  danger  and  destruction. 

But  if  you  refuse  to  confound  conscience  with 
judgment,  educating  the  latter  and  always  obey- 
ing the  former,  you  may  not  always  know  the 
whole  truth  nor  follow  the  absolute  right,  be- 
cause of  your  necessary  ignorance;  but  you  will 
keep  the  glory  of  your  manhood  unstained,  and 
its  integrity  unbroken,  because  you  will  ever  do 
that  which,  according  to  the  light  within  you, 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  7 1 

seems  the  best  to  be  done,  than  which  there  is 
no  better  possible  to  any  one.  To  make  you  do 
that  is  the  one  and  only  work  of  conscience. 


LECTURE  IV. 

THE  DOCTRINE  OF  DEVELOPMENT  AND  THE 
TRUE  SPHERE  OF  CONSCIENCE. 


LECTURE  IV. 

Does  the  true  genesis  of  conscience  imply  that 
it  is  the  result  of  development,  education  and 
training,  and  if  it  does,  wherein  and  to  what 
extent  has  it  authority  over  men  ?  These  are  the 
burning  philosophical  questions  of  the  day. 

The  answer  often  given  to  the  first  question 
is  that  conscience  is  developed  and  may  be  edu- 
cated. And  if  one  says,  ''Then  it  has  a  variable 
voice  and  sometimes  speaks  with  stammering 
tongue  and  not  as  one  having  authority,"  the 
answer  comes  back  very  much  as  follows : 

The  growth  of  conscience  is  very  like  the 
growth  of  the  reason  or  intelligence.  In  the  case 
of  the  intelligence  the  fact  of  development  does 
not  lead  us  to  distrust  our  power  of  discovering 
truth.  The  intelligence  is  a  cognitive  power  and 
perceives  things  and  the  relations  of  things  with- 
out and  within  us.  It  grows  with  our  growth  and 
is  ever  revealing  more  truth.  The  man  knows 
more  than  the  child,  the  civilized  man  more  than 
the  savage,  the  philosopher  more  than  the  peas- 
ant.   And  this  fact  does  not  lead  any  man  to  dis- 


76  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

trust  his  understanding,  does  not  lead  him,  for  ex- 
ample, to  doubt  mathematical  truth  or  the  ordi- 
nary observations  of  experience.*  Just  as  little 
should  the  growth  of  the  moral  power  lead  us  to 
doubt  its  authority.  The  two  are  on  precisely  the 
same  footing. 

But  here  is  where  the  fallacy  of  such  reason- 
ing appears.  The  two  things  are  not  precisely 
alike.  They  are  not  on  the  same  footing  at  all. 
They  are  as  unlike  as  the  perpetual  motion  of  the 
wheels  of  a  clock  and  the  hands  that  mark  and 
the  bell  that  strikes  the  hour.  The  clock  can 
move  on  without  the  hands  and  bell.  Their  of- 
fice is  simply  to  tell  the  hour.  So  conscience  is 
an  everlasting  perception  of  right  and  wrong, 
and  the  impulse  to  choose  the  one  and  reject  the 
other,  while  judgment  is  the  hand  that  points  out 
what  is  right  in  any  given  case  or  the  tongue 
that  names  the  wrong.  The  judgment  is  develop- 
ed and  changes  much  as  the  hands  change  their 
places  on  the  face  of  the  clock.  But  the  central 
shaft  that  moves  the  whole  machinery  changes 
not.  It  moves  ever  in  the  same  way;  points  in 
the  same  direction  and  neither  hastens  nor  slack- 
ens its  speed. 

*Dr.  McCosh — Magazine  Article. 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  '^'J 

Precisely  so,  conscience  never  varies  in  its  tes- 
timony. However  ignorant  or  cultured  the  judg- 
ment, however  clear  or  perplexing  the  environ- 
ment, however  changeful  the  voice  of  reason  in 
the  court  of  evidences,  there  is  absolutely  no 
change  in  conscience.  Its  voice  is  one.  It  testi- 
fies to  the  same  thing  all  the  time.  It  approves 
men  for  living  in  obedience  to  the  law  which 
their  judgment  has  accepted  and  it  disapproves 
all  disloyalty  to  that  law.  But  conscience  does 
not  make  the  law,  does  not  even  choose  it.  The 
choice  is  made  by  the  will  and  judgment  which 
are  always  affected  by  the  opinions  and  culture 
of  the  times  and  what  we  call  in  a  general  way, 
education.  Conscience  is  not  affected  by  this 
education,  has  no  need  of  its  culture.  It  speaks 
almost  automatically.  It  never  fails  to  speak 
when  there  is  need.  It  never  contradicts  itself. 
It  approves  men  when  they  are  loyal  to  the  right 
as  they  know  it,  and  condemns  them  when  they 
violate  the  law  which  they  have  chosen  and  be- 
lieve is  right.  That  is  all  that  conscience  has 
ever  done  or  ever  will  do.  It  is  not  difficult  to 
trace  the  working  of  the  conscience  when  we  ex- 
amine the  processes  in  our  own  nature  and  the 
natures  of  those  about  us,  and  when  we  do  that 
6 


78  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

we  shall  see  that  there  is  no  actual  and  no  con- 
ceivable working  of  conscience  that  does  not  come 
within  the  limitations  of  this  definition.  If  it  be 
said  that,  as  the  organs  of  the  body,  an  eye  or 
a  hand,  for  example,  lose  somewhat  of  their 
power  by  simple  disuse,  so  conscience  grows 
strong  or  weak  according  to  the  action  of  the  will 
in  obeying  or  refusing  to  obey  its  voice;  the 
answer,  I  think,  is  that  the  change  in  conscience 
is  apparent  and  not  real.  The  man's  judgment  is 
changed  by  his  attitude  toward  conscience,  wheth- 
er of  obedience  or  of  disobedience,  and  this  atti- 
tude modifies  his  sensibilities,  making  him  more 
sensitive  to  its  voice  at  some  times  than  at  others. 
But  the  voice  itself  is  not  hushed.  The  ear  has 
become  deaf  and  does  not  hear  it. 

Doctor  Shoup,  in  his  interesting  book  on  Mech- 
anism and  Personality,  has  compared  conscience 
to  inertia.  "Inertia  is  purely  reactionary,  does 
not  exert  energy,  but  resists  simply.  In  like  way 
conscience  does  not  manifest  itself  unless  there 
is  conscious  deviation  or  purpose  of  deviation 
from  the  moral  path  upon  which  the  self  is  mov- 
ing, but  immediately  upon  the  advent  of  a  purpose 
of  deviation  it  sets  up  its  resistance.  And  when 
inertia  has  made  all  the  resistance  competent  to 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  79 

it,  it  becomes  quiescent.  So  with  Conscience, 
when  the  will  has  acted  and  Conscience  has  been 
overridden,  the  protest  ceases  and  is  not  felt  so 
long  as  there  is  no  glancing  back,  but  whenever 
purpose  becomes  tremulous,  the  reactionary  emo- 
tion of  conscience  begins  to  act,  and  the  will  is 
asked  to  return." 

Then  again  in  the  light  of  that  analogy  you 
may  see  how  conscience,  which  like  inertia  is 
blind,  and  knows  nothing  but  action,  sometimes 
resists  a  change  from  worse  to  better.  Take,  for 
example,  the  case  of  a  young  man  brought  up 
in  comparative  seclusion  and  taught  from  child- 
hood to  regard  all  games  such  as  cards,  chess, 
billiards,  and  the  like,  as  having  inherent  in  them 
somewhat  of  sin.  After  a  time  he  goes  into  some 
larger  town  and  into  a  different  society  where 
most  thoughtful  persons  recognize  the  truth  that 
there  is  no  inherent  wrong  in  these  things,  but 
only  in  their  abuse,  and  his  judgment  about 
them  gradually  changes.  But  I  suppose  when 
he  first  began  to  think  the  matter  over  and  to 
live  according  to  his  new  light,  he  felt  certain 
qualms  of  conscience.  So  long  as  a  thing  re- 
mains a  speculative  opinion,  conscience  does  not 
act.    It  is  only  when  the  will  acts  or  purposes  to 


80  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

act  that  conscience  speaks.  But  this  process  of 
the  will  and  judgment  is  gradual  and  so  the  cur- 
rent of  what  we  call  the  moral  nature  is  gradu- 
ally turned.     When  it  is,  conscience  is  silent. 

This  accounts  for  the  fact  that  some  men,  per- 
sisting in  evil,  do  not  seem  to  be  troubled  by 
their  conscience,  while  others  are  always  in  a 
flutter.  In  the  first  case  there  is  no  thought  of 
returning  to  the  right  way,  and  in  the  second  the 
self  is  moving  in  a  constrained  path  and  the 
will  is  ever  on  the  point  of  giving  up  to  recogniz- 
ed obligation.  In  the  cases  which  are  worse  than 
these,  where  conscience  ceases  to  sting,  the  plain 
explanation  is  that  the  will  of  the  man  has  given 
itself  up  to  evil,  according  to  the  truth  of  Dan- 
te's awful  image  of  the  ''serpent  and  the  man 
each  melted  into  other,"  and  there  is  but  one 
will  between  them.  These  are  they  who  call 
evil  good,  and  whose  light  has  become  darkness, 
and  whose  conscience  and  whole  manhood  is 
dead. 

If  that  be  true,  then  there  is  not  only  no  need 
for  a  doctrine  of  development,  but  there  is  great 
danger  hidden  in  such  a  doctrine,  for  it  dethrones 
conscience  from  its  supremacy  of  the  human 
faculties  and  leaves  man,  as  Mr.  Spencer  sarcasti- 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 


cally  says  it  does,  with  a  fitful  guide  that  "pos- 
sesses no  inherent  veracity,  gives  no  uniform 
response,  says  one  thing  in  Europe  and  another  in 
Asia,"  and  leads  him  by  no  surer  hand  than  that 
of  chance.  The  objection  to  this  theory  of  the 
development  does  not  lie  against  the  possibility 
of  development  but  only  against  the  alleged  fact 
and  the  certain  result  of  it. 

Granting,  for  argument's  sake,  that  the  germ 
of  the  sense  of  oughtness  was  implanted  in  hu- 
man nature  by  God,  it  is  easy  to  see  how  it  might 
be  handed  down  through  generations  of  the  race 
by  an  evolution,  through  heredity  and  that  com- 
bination of  forces  which  we  call  natural  selec- 
tion. There  is  no  objection  to  so  much  of  the 
doctrine  of  evolution.  Probably  it  is  handed  down 
from  parent  to  child  and  from  one  genepation 
to  another  in  just  this  way.  And  if  one  goes 
farther  and  accepts  the  whole  Darwinian  theory 
of  the  descent  of  man  (which  certainly  is  not 
yet  proved  no  matter  how  many  evidences  point 
in  that  direction),  he  need  not  lose  sight  or  hold 
of  conscience  as  something  given  by  God,  and 
having  authority  in  human  nature.  For  as  that 
which  is  evolved  from  a  cause  must  have  been 
first  involved  in  it,  so  there  must  have  been  with- 


82  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

in  the  few  germs  that  Mr.  Darwin  acknowledges 
were  created  by  the  Supreme  Deity,  the  essence 
and  life  of  that  conscience  which  we  now  see  liv- 
ing in  and  having  authority  over  human  nature 
to-day.  If  it  has  all  been  under  a  process  con- 
trolled by  God,  the  law  of  Conscience  is  as  much 
His  law  as  the  law  of  nature  or  of  revelation. 
There  is  no  difficulty  in  harmonizing  the  real  na- 
ture and  office  of  conscience  with  that  theory  of 
development,  but  just  as  soon  as  you  make  that 
faculty  itself  subject  to  every  ''wind  of  doctrine," 
give  it  the  power  of  a  giant  or  the  weakness 
oif  a  dwarf,  the  voice  of  an  angel  or  the  snarl  of 
a  devil,  the  love  of  the  truth,  or  the  love  of  a 
lie,  the  choice  of  good  or  the  choice  of  evil,  ac- 
cording to  its  environment  and  education,  you  not 
only  drive  it  off  the  throne  and  out  of  the  throne- 
room  of  human  nature,  but  you  also  degrade 
that  nature  and  make  it  as  liable  to  run  into  the 
vagaries  of  socialism  and  the  madness  of  an- 
archism as  to  walk  in  the  light  of  God's  natural 
and  revealed  truth. 

But  whether  the  original  divinely  implanted 
germ  of  conscience  in  man  has  been  transmitted 
by  the  law  of  heredity  or  not,  it  seems  certain 
that  its  normal  character  and  meaning  must  be 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  83 

distinguished  from  the  purely  intellectual  qual- 
ity and  activity  of  the  soul,  and  that  it  cannot 
without  self-stultification  speak  contradictions  to 
men.  And  it  never  does.  That  it  seems  to  do 
so,  at  times,  is  simply  because  of  the  confusion 
in  the  popular  thought,  of  conscience  and  judg- 
ment. But  these  are  totally  different  the  one  from 
the  other.  The  reason  or  judgment  accepts  a 
certain  rule  as  the  law  for  its  action.  Conscience 
affirms  the  necessity  of  obeying  that  rule.  It 
does  not  define  what  is  absolutely  right.  It  is  the 
business  of  the  reason  or  judgment  to  ascertain 
what  is  right  b}'-  the  best  use  of  all  its  powers 
and  the  light  which  has  been  given  to  it.  When 
that  has  been  done,  conscience  says,  ''Now  do 
what  seems  to  you  to  be  right,"  and  immediately 
the  man  feels  the  mighty  impulse  throbbing 
through  his  nature  to  find  and  do  that  which 
seems  to  him  the  everlasting  right. 

There  is  no  other  view  that  can  explain  the 
variable  verdict  of  sincere  men,  and  the  different 
notions  of  duty  in  different  ages  and  races. 
Human  judgments  vary  according  to  the  vary- 
ing Hght  and  culture  of  men.  Conscience  shines 
ever  like  a  star  and  suffers  no  eclipse.  It  ap- 
proves men  when  they  live  loyal  to  the  right  as 


84  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

they  know  it,  and  it  condemns  them  when  they 
disobey  the  law  which  they  beheve  is  right.  The 
will  acting  through  the  judgment  makes  a  de- 
cision; the  conscience  bids  men  be  true  to  that 
decision.  This,  I  say  again,  is  all  that  it  has  ever 
done  or  ever  will  do. 

It  gave  its  approval  to  Abraham  who  prepared 
to  sacrifice  his  own  son  because  he  believed  the 
voice  and  character  of  God,  and  said  within  him- 
self, "Shall  not  the  Judge  of  all  the  earth  do 
right?"  It  gave  its  sanction  to  Socrates,  who 
for  love  and  loyalty  to  truth,  as  he  conceived  it, 
dared  to  die.  It  gave  its  impulse  and  approval 
to  St.  Paul,  who,  ignorant  of  the  whole  and  high- 
est truth,  yet  loyal  to  the  truth  as  he  understood 
it,  went  in  the  way  of  persecution,  "hahng  men 
and  women  to  prison,"  and  giving  his  voice 
against  them  when  they  were  put  to  death;  all 
the  while  doing  his  terrible  work  as  he  himself 
declares,  "in  all  good  conscience"  before  God. 

The  women  who  throw  their  children  into  the 
Ganges ;  the  people  who  lie  down  to  be  crushed 
by  the  Juggernaut;  the  parents  who  strangle 
their  own  daughters  as  soon  as  they  are  born ; 
the  African  who  kills  his  aged  father  and 
mother  rather  than  see  them  hunger  and  sicken 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  85 

and  suffer;  the  men  who  in  "habitations  deter- 
mined beforehand  by  God"  worshipped  idols  and 
yet  were  called  by  an  inspired  Apostle  "very 
religious;"  the  men  of  the  Inquisition  and  the 
Star  Chamber;  the  prelates  who  in  lighting  the 
fires  of  Smithfield  unwillingly  lighted  a  flame 
that  filled  the  spacious  times  of  great  Elizabeth 
and  has  illuminated  modern  civilization ;  the  iron- 
headed  Calvin  who  burned  Servetus ;  a  certain 
Lord  Chief  Justice  of  England  who  condemned 
two  poor  women  to  the  fire  believing  them  be- 
witched ;  the  stern  Puritans  of  our  own  land  who 
lived  on  the  somber  side  of  all  religious  truths 
and  were  altogether  unwilling  to  grant  to  others 
that  religious  freedom  for  which  they  left  their 
homes  and  even  dared  to  die;  the  English  ritual- 
ist who  went  cheerfully  to  prison  rather  than 
obey  a  law  enacted  by  a  secular  court  which  he 
alone  believed  to  be  without  competent  jurisdic- 
tion of  the  matter  at  issue ;  the  Brooklyn  preacher 
who  withdrew  from  a  body  of  Christian  people 
because  he  believed  he  could  not  stay  among 
them  and  feel  free  to  preach  his  own  opinions; 
the  Ohio  clergyman  who  claimed  the  liberty  of 
proclaiming  within  and  under  the  protection  of 
the  church  doctrines  which  everybody  else  knew 


86  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

the  church  abhorred;  the  modern  Irish  Home 
Ruler  who,  because  he  fancies  the  bit  of  land  he 
lives  upon  is,  or  at  least  ought  to  be,  his  own 
farm,  thinks  himself  justified  in  resisting  all  at- 
tempts to  drive  him  from  it ;  the  wily  Jesuit  who 
has  no  hesitation  in  deceiving  the  enemies  of  the 
Church  because  he  regards  the  end  as  justifying 
the  means ;  the  insane  fanatic  who  tries  to  kill  an 
officer  of  the  State  or  make  his  child  pass  through 
the  fire  to  some  modern  Moloch,  because  his  dis- 
ordered brain  seems  to  hear  a  voice  divine — 
these,  and  many  others  like  them,  would  all  claim 
to  have  been  driven  to  their  courses  by  the  dic- 
tates of  conscience.  That  most  of  their  conduct 
has  been  foolish  and  some  of  it  criminal  is  evi- 
dent to  most  of  us,  and  it  is  quite  certain  that 
multitudes  of  men  who  have  cried  the  wretched 
cant,  "for  the  glory  of  God  and  conscience  sake," 
have  been  either  fanatics  or  fools. 

But  conscience  has  not  played  the  fool  to  these 
men.  It  has  spoken  with  one  voice  all  the  time. 
It  has  commanded  men  everywhere  to  obey  the 
law  or  rule  which  their  judgment  has  accepted, 
and  it  has  rebuked  men  everywhere  when  they 
have  refused  to  obey  the  law  which  they  have 
accepted.     This  view  of  the  subject  may  seem 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  8/ 

novel  to  some  who  hear  it.  But  I  think  it  will  be 
found  after  careful  examination  that  it  is  the  only 
one  that  can  explain  the  variable  verdicts  of  sin- 
cere men  and  the  different  notions  of  duty  in 
different  ages,  races  and  individuals. 

Our  conception  of  duty,  our  acceptance  of  a 
rule  for  our  conduct  is  the  result  of  our  educa- 
tion. You  can  educate  children  to  steal  as  some 
ancient  and  cultivated  people  trained  their  chil- 
dren. You  can  educate  a  Church  to  persecute 
heretics,  as  many  a  Church  has  persecuted,  by 
fire  and  sword.  You  can  educate  men  to  believe 
in  the  right  of  human  slavery.  And  the  thieves, 
persecutors  and  slave  holders  will  do  their  work 
in  all  good  conscience,  just  because  conscience 
is  good  and  is  doing  its  rightful  work  when  it 
stands  guard  over  the  law  which  a  man's  judg- 
ment has  accepted. 

If  it  be  said  that,  after  all,  it  comes  to  the 
same  thing  and  conscience  is  nothing  but  a  moral 
judgment,  the  answer  is,  No;  it  does  not  come 
to  the  same  thing.  To  say  it  does  is  to  juggle 
with  words  and  conceal  their  meaning.  To 
place  conscience  in  a  metaphysical  jumble  where 
it  may  not  be  differentiated  from  thought,  feel- 
ing, judgment,  perception,  reflection,  or  intention, 


88  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

is  not  only  to  treat  a  great  subject  in  a  loose 
and  unscholarly  manner,  but  it  is  also  to  shirk 
the  responsibility  of  solving  the  practical  and 
important  problem  of  a  contradictory  conscience 
and  to  leave  men  in  the  midst  of  a  trackless  sea 
without  the  means  of  finding  the  sure  haven  of 
truth  and  right.  In  a  loose  and  popular  way  con- 
science has  been  called  the  compass  of  a  man's 
life,  pointing  always  to  the  North  Star  of  truth. 
The  figure  is  not  a  happy  one.  The  needle  of 
the  mariner's  compass  seldom  points  exactly  to 
the  true  north.  And  if  you  cover  the  ship's  sides 
with  steel  armor  and  put  into  her  hold  and  on 
her  decks  great  magnets  of  one  kind  or  another, 
the  navigator  will  have  to  verify  the  compass 
many  times  upon  his  voyage  if  he  is  to  reach  in 
safety  the  haven  where  he  would  be. 

Conscience  is  only  in  a  very  limited  sense  the 
compass  of  a  man's  life.  It  does  not,  as  we  have 
before  seen,  always  point  a  man  towards  what 
is  absolutely  right.  Absolute  right  is  eternal  and 
entirely  independent  of  our  notions  about  it.  If 
we  do  not  and  cannot  know  it  because  of  an  edu- 
cation and  environment  for  which  we  were  not 
responsible,  it  is  a  great  misfortune,  but  not  a 
sin.     There  is  no  sin  in  ignorance  which  is  un- 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  89 

avoidable,  provided  we  follow  with  a  willing 
mind  the  voice  of  conscience,  which  always  tells 
us  to  do  what  seems,  all  things  considered,  to  be 
right  to  us.  The  conduct  may  not  be  absolutely, 
but  only  relatively  right,  but  if  conscience  dic- 
tates it,  that  is  the  course  we  must  follow.  And 
following  it,  we  shall  be  using  all  the  light  within 
our  reach.  That  is  the  best  that  any  man  can  do. 
The  man  who  has  done  his  best  is  one  whose 
will,  choice  and  intention  are  all  seeking  the  ab- 
solutely right,  and  who  is,  therefore,  whatever 
be  the  state  of  his  knowledge,  "in  all  good  con- 
science" in  the  sight  of  God  and  men. 


LECTURE  V. 

MORAL  RESPONSIBILITY  AND  THE  AUTHOR- 
ITY OF  CONSCIENCE. 


LECTURE  V. 

Is  conscience  supreme?  Is  every  man  bound  to 
hear  and  obey  its  voice?  These  are,  confessedly, 
questions  of  the  largest  practical  importance.  In 
the  simple  and  quiet  life  of  a  pastoral  people, 
far  from  the  madding  crowd,  they  do  not  often 
press  for  immediate  answers ;  but  where  the 
struggle  for  existence  is  fierce,  competition  strong 
and  friction  incessant,  men  are  forced  to  front 
them  at  almost  every  step.  In  the  varied  spheres 
of  our  work  and  play  there  is  a  large  number 
of  actions  that  involve  no  moral  obligation.  Men 
differ  one  from  another  within  these  spheres  and 
no  one  is  blameworthy.  One  prefers  the  beauty 
and  fragrance  of  the  violet,  another  of  the  rose. 
One  likes  the  taste  of  vegetables  more  than  meat. 
One  thinks  his  own  land  the  best  the  sun  shines 
on,  its  government  the  strongest,  its  men  the 
bravest,  its  women  the  best  and  most  beautiful, 
its  institutions  the  most  beneficent  of  all  in  the 
world.  Another  man  will  honor  and  defend  an- 
other country.  We  would  not  have  it  otherwise. 
This  is  patriotism,  and  v/ithout  it  a  people  is 
7 


94  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

contemptible.  But  there  is  anotlier  and  larger 
class  of  actions  that  are  essentially  moral.  And 
in  the  social,  political,  ecclesiastical  and  business 
life  the  great  questions  that  men  are  fighting  over 
with  intense  earnestness  are  for  the  most  part, 
at  the  heart  and  core  of  them,  moral  questions. 

The  men  who  are  at  once  earnest  and  honest 
feel  bound  by  their  conscience  to  carry  on  their 
battle  for  the  sake  of  truth.  Are  they  so  bound  ? 
Is  conscience  supreme?  If  it  is,  what  and  where 
is  the  authority  of  the  State  and  the  Church  ? 

To  the  first  of  these  questions  the  answer  must 
be.  Yes.  Conscience  is  supreme.  Its  voice  must 
be  obeyed,  because  it  is  inferior  to  God  alone, 
and  has  no  superior  on  earth,  and  to  ''seek  to  de- 
throne it  is  to  invade  the  citadel  of  heaven."* 
But  it  must  be  remembered  that  the  throne  of  its 
empire  is  not  universal.  It  rules  imperially  but 
only  in  its  own  realm.  It  never  transcends  its 
rightful  power  and  limitations.  It  has  no  en- 
tanglements with  foreign  powers  and  neither 
gives  nor  takes  advice  or  help. 

If,  as  many  seem  to  think,  conscience  is  an  un- 
written Bible,  an  unerring  guide  to  human  under- 

*Bishop  Sanderson.  4th  Lecture.  De  Obligatione 
Conscientiae. 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  95 

standing,  an  arbiter  of  truth,  the  judge  of  what 
is  the  true,  dogmatic  faith  of  the  Church  and 
the  true  meaning  and  intent  of  the  law  of  the 
State,  and  if  it  be  so  perfectly  wise  and  infallible 
that  it  never  needs  inquiry  or  evidence,  and  so 
influences  men,  as  Mr.  Lecky  says  it  does,  that 
"they  have  come  instinctively  and  almost  uncon- 
sciously to  judge  all  doctrines  by  their  intuitive 
sense  of  right,  and  to  reject,  or  explain  away,  or 
throw  into  the  background,  those  that  will  not 
bear  the  test,  no  matter  how  imposing  may  be 
the  authority  that  authenticates  them" — then  the 
doctrine  of  its  supremacy  is  full  of  danger.  In 
such  a  case  absolute  truth  and  absolute  right 
would  seem  to  have  no  sure  foundation,  real 
knowledge  would  seem  as  nebulous  as  the  Milky 
Way,  and  in  the  midst  of  a  great  multitude  of 
varying  opinions  and  actions  one  could  not  be 
certain  of  anything. 

But  put  conscience  in  its  true  place  and  let  it 
exercise  its  one  true  office  and  in  its  own  realm 
it  will  be  supreme,  and  yet  have  no  conflict  with 
honest  inquiry,  genuine  evidence,  or  legitimate 
authority.  But  its  place  is  not  the  sphere  of 
the  judgment  and  its  office  is  not  that  of  a  critic, 
a  judge  or  a  guide.    It  is  the  offi.ce  of  the  under- 


96  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

standing  to  criticise,  and  judge  and  point  out  the 
way.  But  when  we  know  the  way  or  think  we 
do ;  when  we  have  apprehended  the  truth,  whether 
by  intuition  or  external  evidence,  the  conscience 
approves  our  walking  in  the  way  of  understand- 
ing and  protests  against  any  departure  from  it. 
Any  one  can  test  the  truth  of  this  description 
for  himself.  So  long  as  one  is  doing  what  he 
thinks  right,  and  especially  when  that  is  the  habit 
of  this  life,  he  will  not  be  particularly  conscious 
of  this  approval  of  conscience,  will  hardly  know 
he  has  an  inward  monitor.  The  athlete  exercis- 
ing for  his  trial  of  strength  could  not  take  a 
single  step  without  the  life  and  action  of  the 
heart,  and  yet  while  the  organs  of  his  body  are 
in  perfect  health  and  harmony,  he  never  thinks 
of  his  heart,  and  he  runs  his  race  or  plays  his 
game  unhindered  and  free.  But  let  the  heart  give 
out,  or  the  muscles  stiffen,  and  he  will  at  once 
be  conscious  of  his  weakness  and  danger.  So 
when  men  follow  the  way  marked  out  by  the  un- 
derstanding, conscience  is  quiet.  But  let  tempta- 
tion arise  and  men  begin  to  wander  from  that 
way,  and  conscience  is  quick  and  keen  to  arrest 
the  attention  and  protest  against  the  departure. 
The  protest  tells  the  man  that  he  is  in  danger 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  97 

of  being  false  to  himself,  of  becoming  morally 
and  intellectually  dishonest,  of  selling  his  liberty 
for  a  price,  of  becoming  a  mere  machine  that  is 
moved  by  an  alien  will  which  his  judgment  ab- 
hors. 

This  indicates  the  final  reason  why  conscience 
must  be  supreme.  It  is  to  preserve  the  integrity 
of  manhood,  the  soundness  and  symmetry  of  per- 
sonal character.  There  is  no  way  possible  to  do 
this  except  by  the  supremacy  of  conscience.  If 
you  dethrone  it  you  at  once  turn  a  moral  agent 
into  a  machine  and  so  throw  contempt  upon  the 
freedom  and  dignity  of  manhood,  and  what  is 
a  still  more  serious  oftence,  you  deny  your  obli- 
gation to  the  Supreme  Creator  of  men,  usurp  the 
prerogatives  of  the  one  Great  Lawgiver,  and  set 
up  a  petty  human  pretender  on  a  rival  throne. 

There  is  no  plainer  inference  to  be  drawn  either 
from  reason  or  Holy  Scripture  than  that  every 
man  has  the  supreme  control  and  determination 
of  his  own  moral  conduct  under  direct  responsi- 
bility to  his  maker.  Our  obligation  to  our  Maker 
grows  out  of  our  relation  to  him.  As  children  we 
owe  our  Father  love  and  obedience.  But  love 
and  obedience  must  be  voluntary  if  they  have 
any  worth  or  meaning.     God  does  not  wish  the 


98  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

service  of  slaves  but  of  children.  Hence  it  is 
that  men  are  free  as  to  the  power  of  choosing 
good  or  evil.  No  man  has  the  right  to  withhold 
love  and  ooedience  from  his  Maker,  but  every 
man  has  the  power  to  do  so.  The  possession  of 
this  power  constitutes  the  glory  of  manhood  and 
creates  its  responsibility.  That  responsibility  is 
placed  upon  us  not  by  our  own  desire,  but  by  the 
will  of  the  Supreme  Creator.  We  can  neither 
take  it  on  nor  put  it  off.  It  is  laid  on  us  by  our 
Creator  and  is  a  part  of  our  original  nature. 
Therefore  it  is  that  all  through  the  Bible  runs  the 
thought  of  human  responsibility  and  that  every- 
where the  appeal  is  made  to  human  freedom. 
"See  I  have  set  before  you  this  day  life  and  good, 
death  and  evil ;  in  that  I  have  commanded  thee 
this  day  to  love  the  Lord  thy  God,  to  walk  in  His 
ways  and  to  keep  His  commandments  and  His 
statutes  and  His  judgments.  I  call  Heaven  and 
Earth  to  record  this  day  against  you  that  I  have 
set  before  you  life  and  death,  blessing  and  curs- 
ing; therefore  choose  life  that  both  thou  and  thy 
seed  may  live ;  that  thou  mayest  love  the  Lord  thy 
God  and  that  thou  mayest  obey  His  voice  and 
that  thou  mayest  cleave  unto  Him ;  for  He  is  thy 
life." 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  99 

That  is  the  declaration  of  the  Bible.  But  it 
is  equally  the  voice  of  reason  and  it  means  that 
there  is  imbedded  in  the  constitution  of  human 
nature  the  power  and  necessity  of  choosing  and 
determining  conduct.  The  necessity  is  on  each 
man.  Each  acts  for  himself.  No  one  can  act 
for  him.  Nothing  is  done  by  proxy.  Every  man 
may  indeed  seek  information,  hear  evidence,  re- 
ceive advice,  listen  to  argument ;  but  when  he  has 
done  all  this,  when  his  understanding  has  been 
informed  and  his  judgment. has  clearly  pointed 
out  his  rightful  course,  he  must  hear  and  obey  the 
voice  of  conscience  that  bids  him  be  true  to  his 
judgment,  true  to  himself.  If  he  plays  the  cow- 
ard now  and  after  the  manner  of  the  Roman 
Governor  takes  the  question  of  his  life,  for  whose 
decision  he  and  no  one  else  in  all  the  world  is 
responsible,  to  a  noisy  mob  and  asks  them  to  de- 
cide it,  he  deserves  much  of  the  contempt  with 
which  Pilate's  name  is  associated,  for  he  has  de- 
graded his  own  manhood  and  trampled  its  crown 
of  freedom  and  responsibility  in  the  dust. 

It  is  impossible,  in  the  very  nature  of  things, 
that  God  should  hold  a  man  accountable  and  un- 
accountable at  the  same  time,  or  that  He  should 
have  created  in  man  a  faculty  whose  voice  always 


lOO  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

utters  a  lie.  This  whole  question  touches  the 
character  of  God  as  well  as  the  nature  of  man. 
There  are  certain  qualities  which  are  absolutely 
essential  to  that  character.  Among  them  are  good- 
ness and  truth.  The  highest  possible  Being  must 
be  both  good  and  true.  It  is  more  than  possible 
that  God's  goodness  transcends  our  estimate  of 
it,  but  it  is  altogether  impossible  that  it  should 
contradict  that  estimate.  Our  conception  of  God's 
goodness  is  formed  from  Our  vision  of  it  in  our 
fellows  and  especially  as  we  see  it  in  the  Divine 
humanity  of  our  Blessed  Lord.  We  can  have 
no  intelligent  idea  of  His  goodness  and  truth,  ex- 
cept as  we  see  in  Him  the  highest  degree  of  those 
qualities  which,  when  seen  in  men,  excite  our 
love  and  reverence.  We  must  interpret  God's 
nature  by  man's  nature ;  and  Christ  teaches  us 
to  do  this  when  He  says,  "If  ye  being  evil,  know- 
how  to  give  good  gifts  to  your  children,  how 
much  more  shall  your  Father  which  is  in  Heaven 
give  good  things  to  them  that  ask  Him."* 

Doubtless  goodness,  wisdom,  truth,  as  they  are 
in  God,  are  larger  and  purer  than  they  arc  in  us. 
Still  it  is  and  must  be  true  that  these  and  other 
qualities  that  are  in  both  man  and  God  are  in 

*St.  Matt,  vii.,  9. 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  lOI 

their  essence  alike.  To  suppose  that  these  are 
one  thing  in  God  and  a  totally  different  thing  in 
man  is  to  destroy  all  possibility  of  communion, 
sympathy  and  adoration.  If  He  is  so  different 
from  man  that,  after  all,  He  may  contradict  the 
very  ideas  of  morality  which  we  have  learned 
from  His  revelation  and  from  those  whose  char- 
acter has  been  influenced  by  it,  then  I  suppose 
He  may  be  dreaded  as  Fate  or  as  a  fiend,  but  I 
am  sure  He  can  never  be  loved  as  a  Father. 

Dean  Mansell  affirmed  in  certain  speculations 
concerning  the  Infinite  that  God's  goodness  may 
not  have  laws  and  attributes  represented  by  any- 
thing that  we  know,  because  an  infinite  Personal- 
ity can  never  be  known  intellectually.  But  the 
most  of  us  would  give  up  searching  after  God 
if  we  were  convinced  that  we  could  find  only  a 
myth  or  a  devil.  And  there  are  Christian  men 
who,  in  such  a  case,  would  not  hesitate  to  adopt 
for  their  own  the  strong  and  remarkable  words 
of  John  Stuart  Mill: 

"To  say  that  God's  goodness  may  be  different 
in  kind  from  man's  goodness,  what  is  it  but  say- 
ing v/ith  slight  change  of  phraseology  that  God 
may  possibly  not  be  good?  To  assert  in  words 
what  we  do  not  think  in  meaning,  is  as  suitable 


I02  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

a  definition  as  can  be  given  of  a  moral  falsehood. 
If  instead  of  the  glad  tidings  that  there  exists  a 
Being  in  whom  all  the  excellencies  which  the 
highest  human  mind  can  conceive  exist  in  a  de- 
gree inconceivable  to  us,  I  am  informed  that  the 
world  is  ruled  by  a  Being  whose  attributes  are 
infinite,  but  what  they  are  we  cannot  learn,  nor 
what  are  the  principles  of  His  government,  ex- 
cept that  the  highest  morality  which  we  are  cap- 
able of  conceiving  does  not  sanction  them;  con- 
vince me  of  it,  and  I  will  bear  my  fate  as  I  may. 
But  when  I  am  told  that  I  must  believe  this,  and 
at  the  same  time  call  this  Being  by  the  names 
which  express  and  afiirm  the  highest  human 
morality,  I  say  in  plain  terms  that  I  will  not. 
Whatever  power  such  a  Being  may  have  over  me, 
there  is  one  thing  that  He  shall  not  do :  He  shall 
not  compel  me  to  worship  Him.  I  will  call  no  Be- 
ing good  who  is  not  what  I  mean  when  I  apply 
that  epithet  to  my  fellow-creatures ;  and  if  such 
a  Being  can  sentence  me  to  hell  for  not  so  calling 
him,  to  hell  I  will  go."* 

Strong  and  bold  these  words  are.   But  I  am  not 
sure  that  they  are  too  strong  for  the  denial  and 

^Examination  of  Sir  William  Hamilton's  Philosophy, 
Vol.  I.,  Ch.  7. 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  I03 

denunciation  of  a  theory  that  practically  makes 
God  unknowable  and  that  contradicts  the  mean- 
ing of  the  Incarnation  by  making  its  message  sad 
tidings  of  fear  instead  of  glad  tidings  of  great 
joy.  Our  knowledge  of  God's  character  may  be 
limited  in  degree,  but  if  it  be  not  real  knowledge 
so  far  as  it  goes,  then  indeed  we  are  among  the 
most  wretched  of  agnostics,  and  neither  reason 
nor  revelation  can  dispel  our  ignorance. 

But  we  are  not  agnostics.  We  know  God  botli 
through  reason  and  revelation.  The  revelation 
always  appeals  to  our  reason.  It  asks  nO'  man 
to  believe  without  some  reason  for  his  faith.  And 
no  man  ever  did  believe  anything  without  some 
reason.  He  may  not  have  been  able  always  to 
give  an  explicit  reason  for  his  faith,  but  he  al- 
ways had  an  implicit  one.  The  Bible  appeals  to 
us  as  reasonable  beings  who  have  the  power  and 
are  under  obligation  to  govern  ourselves  in 
accordance  with  God's  laws.  And  it  never  once 
intimates  that  there  can  be  any  substitute  for  a 
man's  own  judgment  and  conscience.  It  could 
not  allow  any  substitute  without  destroying  man's 
freedom  and  accountability  nor  without  travesty- 
ing God's  character  as  if  He  had  given  His  reve- 
lation as  a  means  of  concealing  thought. 


104  -^  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

The  revelation  which  God  has  given  us  in  His 
Holy  Word  was  not  intended  to  destroy  our  free- 
dom and  compel  our  reason.  It  was  intended 
to  give  us  a  revelation  of  larger  knowledge  and 
clearer  light  and  so  to  furnish  us  a  more  certain 
guide  than  we  had  before  it  was  given.  Saint 
Paul  expressed  this  truth  in  his  sermon  on  Mars 
Hill  when  he  said,  "Ye  men  of  Athens,  I  perceive 
that  in  all  things  ye  are  very  religious.  For  as  I 
passed  by  and  beheld  your  devotions  I  found  an 
altar  with  this  inscription,  To  the  Unknown  God. 
Whom  therefore  ye  ignorantly  worship.  Him  de- 
clare I  unto  you."  The  meaning  is,  that  the 
Christian  revelation  has  lightened  our  darkness, 
that  we  may  see  our  way  clearly.  If  we  were 
compelled  by  an  irresistible  external  power  to 
walk  in  that  way,  light  would  be  of  no  special 
advantage  for  we  should  be  drawn  as  surely  blind 
as  seeing.  The  fact  and  statement  that  the  Holy 
Scriptures  are  intended  for  our  learning  pre- 
suppose our  possession  of  reason  and  moral  and 
intellectual  freedom,  and  although  these  Scrip- 
tures ''command,  argue,  persuade  and  entreat," 
they  leave  the  control  of  our  conduct  to  our- 
selves. 

What  then,  it  will  be  asked,  becomes  of  the 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  IO5 

authority  of  the  Bible  and  of  the  Church?   Take 
the  first  question  first. 

The  Holy  Scriptures  are  undoubtedly  a  divine 
rule  for  men.  V/e  are  under  obligations  to  keep 
the  law  that  is  revealed  in  them.  But  it  is  per- 
fectly evident  that  l^efore  we  can  keep  a  law  we 
must  know  its  meaning.  God's  laws  are  all  quite 
independent  of  our  notions  about  them.  They 
existed  before  we  were  born  and  will  continue 
long  after  our  death.  They  hang  over  the  cradle 
as  well  as  the  font ;  over  our  bank  books  as  well 
as  our  prayer  books ;  over  our  money  safes  as 
well  as  our  altars.  They  are  about  our  beds  and 
around  all  our  ways,  and  we  can  never  go  be- 
yond their  reach.  And  yet  it  is  equally  certain 
that  before  we  can  voluntarily  obey  a  law  we 
must  know  it  as  a  law  and  have  some  conception 
of  its  meaning.  That  meaning  must  be  ascer- 
tained by  the  use  of  reason.  The  knowledge  of  a 
revelation  that  was  given  at  divers  times,  in  sun- 
dry places  and  to  different  individuals  is  not  in- 
nate. It  is  humanly  speaking  impossible  for  any 
one  to  know  its  meaning  except  by  the  use  of 
reason,  our  own  or  that  of  some  other  human 
being.  Seeking  it  at  the  lips  of  a  priest,  a  preach- 
er, a  prayer  book,  a  creed,  formula,  a  set  of  ar- 


I06  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

tides  or  a  system  of  theology,  does  not  preclude 
the  necessity  of  employing  reason  to  find  out  the 
interpretation  of  the  law  of  the  Lord. 

Some  nineteenth  century  seeker  of  the  truth 
may  not  understand  the  prophecy  of  the  atone- 
ment any  better  than  did  the  ancient  Ethiopian, 
and  may  therefore  ask  some  well-instructed 
Philip  to  guide  him  in  his  reading.  But  the 
guide  does  not  guess  his  way,  and  unless  he  use 
his  own  or  another's  reason  to  understand  the 
meaning  of  the  message  that  he  is  commissioned 
to  give,  it  will  be  a  case  of  the  blind  leading  the 
blind,  with  both  falling  into  the  ditch.  How 
far  the  Church  may  help  the  inquirer  we  shall 
see  later  on. 

But  in  this  connection  I  wish  to  admit  and  em- 
phasize the  fact  that,  while  God's  law  is  over 
us  all  and  ought  to  be  known  by  us  all,  it  is  still 
true  that  there  are  many  persons,  probably  a 
much  larger  number  than  we  commonly  suppose, 
who  by  reason  of  causes  entirely  beyond  their 
control  are  ignorant  of,  or  misunderstand  the 
law  of  God  as  given  in  the  Bible.  A  pagan  en- 
vironment, defective  early  education  and  train- 
ing, evil  associations,  the  influence  of  heredity 
and  other  influen«ces,  leave  some  persons  wh(7''".v 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  IO7 

sincerity  cannot  be  questioned  in  a  position  where 
it  is  impossible  for  them  to  see  clearly  and  right- 
ly understand  the  truth.  They  are,  so  to  speak, 
morally  and  intellectually  color-blind.  They  hold 
wrong  opinions.  Some  of  them  worship  both 
unknown  and  unreal  gods.  Some  deny  the  truth 
that  we  hold  most  dear,  and  yet  have  a  good 
conscience  and  obey  it  strictly.  What  will  you 
do  with  them?  Will  you  say,  as  so  many  do, 
in  your  haste  and  heat,  it  is  impossible,  they  can- 
not have  a  good  conscience?  The  answer  is, 
evidence  is  against  you.  Out  of  the  Bible  itself 
the  proof  comes  to  confront  you.  Saul  the  perse- 
cutor had  as  good  a  conscience  as  Paul  the  Apos- 
tle had.  At  the  heart  of  him  he  was  probably 
as  good  a  man  morally  when  he  was  haling  men 
to  prison  as  he  was  when,  later,  he  preached  on 
Mars  Hill.  He  was  not  converted  from  badness 
to  goodness.  He  w^as  not  changed  from  a  sin- 
ner into  a  saint.  He  was  brought  out  of  darkness 
into  light.  His  judgment  was  informed  and 
changed.  His  conscience  remained  unchanged. 
Your  charge  therefore  will  not  hold,  for  there 
are  undoubtedly  cases  in  modern  life  much  like 
his  in  principle,  though  without  the  same  circum- 
stances. 


Io8  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

Will  you  go  on  repeating  the  pious  sarcasm 
about  the  "uncovenanted  mercies  of  God"?  St. 
Peter  will  unhesitatingly  reply,  '*Of  a  truth  I 
perceive  that  God  is  no  respecter  of  persons.  But 
in  every  nation  he  that  feareth  Him  and  worketh 
righteousness  is  accepted  with  Him."  And  St. 
Paul  will  add  his  voice  and  tell  you  that  ''When 
the  Gentiles  which  have  not  the  law  do  by  na- 
ture the  things  contained  in  the  law,  these  hav- 
ing not  the  law  are  a  law  unto  themselves,  in 
that  they  show  the  work  of  the  law  written  in 
their  hearts,  their  conscience  bearing  witness 
therevvdth  and  their  thoughts  one  with  another, 
accusing  or  else  excusing  them,"  and  then  he 
will  add  in  a  sentence  of  tremendous  meaning, 
"One  only  is  the  Lawgiver  and  Judge,  even  He 
who  is  able  to  save  and  destroy,  but  who  art  thou 
that  judgest  thy  neighbor?" 

The  meaning  is  that  no  man  has  the  right  to 
judge  the  conscience  of  another.  That  is  the  sole 
right  and  prerogative  of  the  Almighty  and  Om- 
niscient God. 

What  then  is  the  duty  of  such  persons  as  I 
have  mentioned?  Clearly  it  is  first  the  duty  of 
keeping  a  good  conscience,  and,  secondly,  of  in- 
forming their  judgment.     They  must  use  all  the 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  I09 

light  they  have,  become  freed  as  far  as  possible 
from  prejudice,  willing  to  know  the  whole  truth, 
no  matter  what  the  consequences  may  be,  and 
then  pray  God  ''to  forgive  us  all  our  sins,  negli- 
gences and  ignorances." 

When  men  have  done  all  this  in  honesty  and 
sincerity,  when  they  have  used  all  the  light  they 
have  and  all  within  their  reach,  they  have  done 
all  that  is  possible  for  men  to  do,  and  they  need 
not  fear  that  God  will  ask  impossibilities  of  them. 

If,  like  St.  Paul,  they  know  nothing  against 
themselves,  they  are  not  thereby  perfectly  justi- 
fied, for  it  is  possible  that  they  might  have  known 
and  done  more  than  they  did  know  and  do.  But 
they  may  be  certain  that  He  that  judgeth  them 
is  a  merciful,  wise  and  just  Lord,  who  will  give 
honest  intentions,  sincere  desires  and  righteous- 
ness of  life  their  due  reward. 


LECTURE  VI. 

THE  AUTHORITY  OF  THE  CHURCH  IN  ITS 
RELATION  TO  CONSCIENCE  AND  INDI- 
VIDUAL JUDGMENT. 


LECTURE  VI. 

The  final  question  for  our  consideration  in  these 
lectures  touches  the  relation  of  the  Church  to 
the  judgment  and  conscience  of  men  in  respect 
of  their  religious  opinions  and  belief. 

Has  the  Church  any  authority  whatever  over 
conscience?  Has  the  Church  any  authority  to 
suspend,  suppress,  compel  or  even  subordinate 
to  her  expressed  will  the  individual  or  private 
judgment  of  men?  These  are  confessedly  im- 
portant questions,  and  if  they  are  old  ones  they 
seem  somehow  ever  new  and  ever  needing  an- 
swers. The  answers  will  depend  very  much 
upon  what  is  meant  by  authority. 

Our  own  Church  in  the  twentieth  of  her  Thir- 
ty-nine Articles  declares,  "The  Church  hath 
power  to  decree  rites  or  ceremonies  and  author- 
ity in  controversies  of  faith,"  and  it  seems  a 
fair  inference  from  that  declaration  that  she 
claims  authority  to  declare  what  has  always  been 
the  faith,  to  make  laws  for  public  worship,  the 
administration  of  the  Sacraments,  to  perpetuate 
its    offices    and    to    administer    discipline.      The 


114  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

article  seems  also  to  intimate  that  doctrines 
contained  in  Holy  Scripture  and  necessary  to  be 
believed  are  not  to  be  left  to  the  individual  judg- 
ment to  accept  or  reject  as  it  chooses.  But  for 
some  reason  she  left  the  declaration  incomplete 
and  did  not  name  the  judge  who  should  decide 
what  doctrines  are  in,  or  may  be  proved  by  the 
Scriptures,  nor  did  she  so  much  as  suggest  how 
any  judgment  should  be  executed. 

To  many  men  in  and  out  of  the  Church  this  has 
been  regarded  as  her  chief  defect  and  greatest 
weakness.  Every  thoughtful  and  earnest  mind 
desires  to  know  the  certainty  of  those  things 
wherein  it  has  been  instructed,  and  they  who  are 
often  perplexed  and  easily  wearied  by  the  diffi- 
cult questions  that  are  suggested  by  the  study 
of  natural  and  revealed  religion,  long  for  noth- 
ing so  much  as  an  infallible  teacher  and  an 
authoritative  voice  that  shall  settle  and  close  these 
questions  forever.  The  desire  is  natural  and 
laudable  and  is  doubtless  intended  to  lead  toward 
the  attainment  of  larger  knowledge,  and  by  means 
of  it  the  "thoughts  of  men  are  widened  with 
the  process  of  the  suns."  But  he  is  a  poor  philos- 
opher who  regards  his  own  wants  and  wishes  as 
evidence  that  they  will  certainly  be  fulfilled  in 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  II5 

his  life,  or  even  that  the  things  wished  for  really 
exist.  That  is  one  of  the  illusions  common  to 
youth  and  it  is  not  infrequently  a  delusion  as 
well. 

A  religion  or  a  system  of  theology,  freed  from 
all  mystery,  separated  from  all  historical  investi- 
gations, requiring  no  individual  study,  commend- 
ed and  commanded  by  an  infallible  and  overpow- 
ering authority,  has  doubtless  a  fascination  for 
many  minds,  and  to  the  indolent,  unintellectual 
and  unaspiring  seems  in  every  way  to  be  desired. 
But  if  anyone  fancies  that  Christianity  is  such  a 
religion,  he  has  only  to  read  its  history  to  realize 
his  mistake.  From  the  coming  of  the  Son  of 
Man  to  His  ascension  into  heaven  and  from 
that  time  till  now,  the  Christian  religion  has  ap- 
pealed to  the  reason,  heart  and  conscience  of  in- 
dividual men. 

Whatever  authority  is  possessed  by  the  Church 
which  holds  Christ's  teaching  and  truth  for  hu- 
man salvation,  that  authority  must  be  interpreted 
in  harmony  with  the  truth  that  the  Christian  re- 
ligion appeals  to  the  reason  of  men,  that  it  ex- 
pects them  to  be  ready  to  give  an  answer  to 
those  who  ask  reasons  for  Christian  hope  and 
faith,  and  that  it  everywhere  recognizes  the  su- 


Il6  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

premacy  of  conscience.  "No  such  doctrine  as  the 
substitution  of  authority  for  conscience  was  ever 
taught  by  our  Lord.  The  system  that  denies  the 
supremacy  of  conscience  is  the  growth  of  a  later 
age."* 

Before  we  examine  the  system  that  makes  that 
denial,  it  will  be  well  for  us  to  look  at  some  kinds 
of  authority  which  the  common  judgment  of  men 
recognizes  as  legitimate.  One  does  not  have  to 
look  far  to  find  that  principle  of  authority  com- 
monly admitted  in  the  affairs  of  practical  life.  It 
may  not  be  regarded  always  as  absolute  or  in- 
fallible, but  it  is  no  less  recognized  for  all  prac- 
tical purposes,  as  real  authority. 

Take  the  relation  of  parent  and  child.  With- 
out the  recognition  of  a  real  authority  of  a  father 
over  his  child  every  household  would  be  sooner 
or  later  divided  against  itself,  and  the  larger  life 
of  society  and  the  State  would  be  disordered  and 
endangered.  The  State  recognizes  the  rightful- 
ness and  necessity  of  parental  authority  and  when 
parents  die  leaving  minor  children,  it  throws  its 
own  authority  about  them  both  to  guard  their 
right  and  command  their  obedience.    No  one  who 

*The  Rev.  Samuel  Seabury,  D.  D.  Sermons  on  Con- 
science,    P.  21. 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  II7 

loves   his   country   and   his  kind   would   have  it 
otherwise. 

In  the  educational  systems  of  our  own  and  every 
other  land  the  principle  of  authority  is  freely 
recognized  and  acted  upon.  The  boy  goes  to 
school  not  always  because  he  wishes  to  go,  but 
rather  because  he  is  sent  by  one  having  authority 
over  him.  The  teacher  in  Grammar  School  and 
University  instructs  his  students  not  according  to 
rules  and  methods  which  his  fancy  chooses,  but 
in  accordance  with  principles  and  laws  which 
have  the  authority  of  demonstrated  utility  and 
superiority.  When  you  pass  from  secular  to  re- 
ligious training  the  same  recognition  of  the  prin- 
ciple is  even  more  clearly  seen.  Even  those  re- 
ligionists, the  logical  tendency  of  whose  theolog- 
ical and  ecclesiastical  system  would  lead  them 
to  leave  their  children  without  any  religious 
training  until  they  should  be  old  enough  to  choose 
for  themselves  what  kind  they  would  have,  are 
better  than  their  creed,  and  with  an  inconsistency 
that  is  as  amazing  as  it  is  absurd,  substitute  the 
Sunday-school  for  the  Church.  Experience,  to 
say  nothing  of  common  sense,  teaches  us  all  that 
we  cannot  afford  to  let  our  children  serve  an  ap- 
prenticeship of  fifteen   or  twenty  years   to   the 


Il8  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

world,  the  flesh  and  the  devil,  and  then  expect 
them  to  be  converted  by  miracle  or  magic,  from 
vice  to  virtue  and  from  darkness  to  light.  We 
cannot  afford  to  wait  for  a  condition  that  may 
never  be  created,  and  that  is  not  likely  to  be 
created  by  a  waiting  policy.  However  careful 
we  may  be  not  to  interfere  with  the  freedom  and 
obligation  of  another's  personality  and  conscience 
we  are  nevertheless,  consciously  or  unconsciously, 
influencing  the  religious  development  of  our  chil- 
dren. We  cannot  avoid  this.  It  is  part  of  the 
personal  influence  that  each  possesses  and  exerts 
whether  he  will  or  not,  and  by  reason  of  which 
no  man  liveth  or  dieth  to  himself,  and  every  man 
is  set,  as  the  Master  was,  for  the  rising  or  fall- 
ing of  many. 

Then  there  is  that  large  class  of  persons  of 
whom  Dr.  Newman  tells  us  in  his  essay  on 
Private  Judgment,  who  by  reason  of  their  de- 
fective education  and  environment  are  unable  to 
''inquire,  reason,  and  decide  about  religion." 
Many  of  these,  it  must  be  confessed,  are  influ- 
enced toward  their  particular  life  by  what  is, 
in  some  sense,  the  authority  of  the  example  of 
their  employer,  associate,  preacher  or  personal 
friend,  without  much  careful  thought  and,  it  may 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  II9 

be,  without  much  searching  of  the  heart.  The 
authority  is  not  consciously  recognized  as  such 
in  these  cases,  and  it  is  not  arbitrarily  enforced, 
but  it  is  none  the  less  a  real  authority  and  has  its 
due  effect. 

Besides  all  this,  there  is  the  larger  authority 
of  the  State  which  must  be  taken  into  account. 
This  is  perfectly  real  and  absolutely  necessary  to 
the  "safety,  honor  and  welfare  of  the  people," 
and  that  "all  things  may  be  so  ordered  and  set- 
tled upon  the  best  and  surest  foundations,  that 
peace  and  happiness,  truth  and  justice,  religion 
and  piety  may  be  established  among  us  for  all 
generations."*  The  authority  of  the  State  is  ex- 
ercised for  the  general  good,  that  no  man  may 
be  deprived  of  his  rights,  that  every  man  may 
be  compelled  to  perform  his  public  duties,  and 
that  all  may  be  secure  in  the  possession  of  life 
and  property. 

There  is  also  a  certain  authority  exercised  by 
the  general  consent  of  mankind.  It  is  not  abso- 
lute and  is  never  enforced  as  that  of  the  parent 
and  the  State  is  sometimes  enforced.  But  with 
the  majority  of  men  it  is  real  authority,  or  at 
least  they  submit  to  it  as  if  it  were  real  and  in- 

*Book  of  Common  Prayer,  Prayer  for  Congress. 


I20  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

vincible,  contenting  themselves  "with  holding 
that  true  which  mankind  generally  believe  and  so 
long  as  they  believe  it;  or  that  which  has  been 
believed  by  those  who  pass  for  the  most  eminent 
among  the  minds  of  the  past/'f 

This  process  of  settling  individual  tendencies 
and  opinions  by  bringing  to  bear  upon  them  the 
weight  of  a  general  conviction  may  be  seen  in 
different  schools  of  thought  in  the  Church;  in 
trades  unions  and  brotherhoods  of  working  men ; 
in  the  various  associations  of  professional  and 
business  men,  and  more  conspicuously  in  the  po- 
litical parties  of  our  own  and  other  lands.  In 
these  different  groups  there  are  not  a  few  who 
do  not  thoroughly  understand  the  meaning  of 
their  own  union,  but  the  members  hold  together 
both  by  their  personal  affinities  for  each  other 
and  by  their  common  sympathy  with  the 
principles  and  purposes  of  their  organiza- 
tions. Many  an  individual  whose  judg- 
ment has  seen  clearly  and  declared  emphat- 
ically the  unwisdom  of  a  proposed  general  ces- 
sation of  work  on  the  part  of  the  order  to  which 
he  belongs,  has  nevertheless  'submitted  to  the 
authority  of  the  large  majority  of  his  brotherhood 

tJ.  S.  Mill.     Essay  on  Theism. 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  121 

when  it  has  declared  that  a  strike  was  on.  Ob- 
viously in  cases  of  this  kind  the  authority  has 
been  that  of  an  influence  rather  than  that  of  a 
law  and  power,  human  or  divine,  but  oftentimes 
the  influence  has  been  so  great  and  has  been 
backed  by  such  threats  of  fearful  penalty  to  those 
who  may  resist  it,  as  to  be  practically  an  author- 
ity to  all  on  whom  it  has  been  exercised.  Besides 
these  particular  cases,  it  is  perfectly  true  that 
we  are  all  influenced  consciously  or  unconsciously 
by  the  condition,  feeling,  opinions  and  conduct 
of  our  fellows.  We  receive  this  influence  be- 
fore we  examine  it,  sometimes  before  we  realize 
it;  and  it  always  comes  to  us  in  the  first  place 
as  a  kind  of  authority  from  which,  at  that  time, 
we  do  not  think  of  rebelling. 

Then  there  is  a  general  belief  in  the  accept- 
ance of  scientific  authority.  In  one  sense  of  the 
word  there  is  no  authority  in  or  over  science 
and  yet,  in  another  sense,  a  true  science  is  full  of 
authority  because  it  is  the  result  of  investigations 
which  have  been  repeated,  tested  and  proved  so 
frequently  and  thoroughly,  and  by  such  compe- 
tent scholars  that  everyone  accepts  the  results 
of  their  work  and  no  one  thinks  of  questioning 
it.     It  is  not  a  bUnd  submission  on  our  part,  be- 


122  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

cause  we  have  ourselves  tested  their  reasoning 
and  the  result  up  to  a  certain  point,  and  finding 
that  result  correct,  so  far  as  we  have  examined 
it,  we  trust  that  the  whole  process  of  reasoning 
is  as  sound  as  that  part  which  we  have  examined. 
A  good  many  of  us,  when  we  were  boys,  studying 
arithmetic  and  algebra,  made  mistakes  in  our 
calculations  and  were  surprised  and  annoyed  to 
find  the  answers  to  the  problems  given  in  the 
books  different  from  those  we  had  worked  out. 
But  we  seldom  took  it  into  our  little  stupid 
heads  that  the  author  was  wrong  and  we  were 
right.  We  accepted  his  answer  as  authoritative, 
worked  over  our  problems  once  more  and  found 
the  answer  in  the  book  correct. 

We  are  in  practically  the  same  condition  now 
that  we  are  grown.  We  trust  the  mathematician, 
the  geologist,  the  biologist,  the  botanist,  the  phy- 
sician, because  we  believe  they  have  the  authority 
of  facts  behind  them  which  we  have  neither  the 
time  nor  the  ability  to  investigate.  Their  author- 
ity guides  us  toward  and  assures  us  of  the  safe 
conclusion  which  we  wish  to  reach. 

Then  there  is  the  authority  of  truth  itself,  veri- 
fied by  intuition.  Unlike  all  other  kinds  of  author- 
?ty,  in  that  it  has  no  external  organ  to  speak 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  I23 

or  enforce  its  will,  it  is  still,  in  some  respects, 
the  most  powerful  of  all  authority  under  God 
and  carries  with  it  its  own  witness  and  verifica- 
tions. It  is  of  this  that  Coleridge  speaks  when 
he  says  of  the  Bible,  *'It  finds  me  in  my  deepest 
nature."  Because  there  is  a  recognized  cor- 
respondence between  the  truth  and  the  most  real 
needs  of  man,  and  because  truth  is  adapted  to  his 
wants  and  satisfies  them,  it  is  accepted  without 
argument.  No  man  needs  to  hear  an  essay  on 
the  chemical  properties  of  a  sunbeam  to  make 
him  feel  its  warmth  when  the  sun  is  shining. 
And  so  truth  and  religion  are  their  own  best 
arguments  and  witnesses  to  the  mind  that  is 
fitted  to  receive  them.  Truth  commands  and 
subjugates  by  its  presence,  and,  like  Emerson's 
beauty,  "is  its  own  excuse  for  being."  The  most 
perfect  exhibition  of  this  authority  was  seen  in 
our  Lord  when  He  met  those  who  afterward 
said,  ''He  spake  as  one  having  authority  and  not 
as  the  Scribes."  The  Scribes  spoke  by  rule,  from 
the  book,  according  to  the  formula  whose  prin- 
ciple they  seem  not  to  have  perceived.  Christ 
was  utterly  unlike  them;  He  seldom  appealed 
to  any  external  authority;  He  never  laid  down 
minute   and   complex   rules  ■   but   somehow    His 


124  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

thought  was  like  the  atmosphere  of  heaven,  His 
words  touched  the  springs  of  human  nature,  and 
His  truth  carried  in  itself  its  heavenly  and  eter- 
nal authority. 

Recognizing,  as  we  must,  the  principle  of 
authority  and  the  exhibitions  of  it  which  we  have 
had  under  review,  the  questions  now  to  be  an- 
swered are,  whether  these  manifestations  of 
authority  are  in  any  way  inconsistent  with  the 
free  exercise  of  reason,  and  whether  the  Church 
in  matters  of  faith  and  order  has  any  authority 
to  compel  the  individual  judgment  of  her  mem- 
bers so  that  they  must  either  kill  their  conscience 
or  remain  outside  of  the  Church. 

No  man  who  is  not  blind  to  the  lesson  of  the 
ages  will  fail  to  see  that  there  are  some  results  of 
the  common  thought  of  mankind  that  stand  sure. 
They  are  among  the  things  that  cannot  be  shaken. 
And  because  they  are,  they  have  what  we  call 
authority.  Yet  not  one  of  these  that  I  have 
mentioned  is  contrary  to  reason.  They  have  all 
been  secured  by  the  use  of  the  reasoning  power, 
and  that  not  of  some  vaguely  imagined  collective 
or  corporate  faculty  of  the  race,  but  by  the  exer- 
cise of  individual  reason.  There  is  no  such  thing 
as  corporate  reason  either  in  the  world  or  in  the 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  I25 

Church.  Men  are  personal.  They  have  individu- 
ahty.  They  have  been  placed  in  social  relations 
and  each  man  is  bound  up  with  the  race.  He  may 
never  lose  sight  of  the  solidarity  of  the  race  and 
yet  every  exercise  of  his  judgment  for  its  welfare 
is  his  own  act.  He  may  never  outgrow  the  larger 
wisdom  of  the  community  and  the  world  he  lives 
in,  and  yet  he  is  obliged  to  think  his  own  thoughts, 
use  his  own  judgment  and  follow  his  own  con- 
science. And  it  is  in  just  this  way  that  men 
have  come  to  accept  such  authority  as  I  have  out- 
lined, not  because  it  is  arbitrary,  overwhelming, 
all-compelling,  as  authority,  but  because  it  is 
seen  to  rest  on  a  reasonable  foundation.  It  is 
the  aggregated  judgment  of  men,  and  as  such  it 
is  of  great  importance  and  offers  a  reason  and 
claims  the  right  to  be  heard  and  heeded.  But 
the  ground  of  the  reason  and  right  is  its  ecu- 
menicity. It  is  certain  that  in  general  the  wis- 
dom of  many  is  larger  that  that  of  any  one  man. 
Therefore  it  is  that  the  individual  steadies  his 
own  judgment  by  that  of  his  fellows. 

Every  thoughtful  observer  sees  that  we  have 
fallen  upon  times  when  the  path  of  thought  is 
away  from  individualism  and  towards  the  social 
point  of  view.    Theories  of  society  are  supplant- 

9 


126  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

ing  theories  of  the  individual.  The  soUdarity 
of  humanity  is  the  prominent  thought  in  the  sci- 
entific and  historical  study  of  man.  It  is  even 
running  to  the  extreme  of  determinism  which  an- 
nihilates the  individual.  There  is  danger  in  this 
tendency  if  carried  to  the  point  when  the  com- 
mon cry  is  "vox  popvili  vox  Dei."  The  voice  of 
the  people  is  not  always  and  necessarily  the  voice 
of  God.  Athanasius  contra  mundum,  and  fight- 
ing it  for  the  faith ;  Galileo  insisting  that  the 
world  does  move;  Columbus  determined  to  find 
a  new  route  and  a  new  world  for  men,  and  every 
patient  scholar  who  has  discovered  a  truth  un- 
known to  and  opposed  by  his  fellows,  all  have 
proved  indisputably  that  the  world  is  not  always 
right  in  its  opinions,  and  have  shown,  among 
other  things,  that  private  judgment  is  sometimes 
superior  to  the  best  and  highest  human  authority. 
What  is  true  of  individual  judgment  in  regard 
to  so  many  of  the  opinions  of  men  concerning 
matters  outside  of  the  Church,  is  equally  true  of 
the  authority  of  the  Church  itself.  That  the 
Church  has  authority  is  perfectly  true,  but  that  it 
has  any  authority  to  coerce  and  compel  the  indi- 
vidual judgment  must  be  forever  emphatically  de- 
nied. "And  the  reason  is  that  God's  government  of 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  12/ 

His  Church  is  not  coercive  and  compulsory  like 
the  governments  of  this  world,  but  of  a  moral 
and  spiritual  nature.  Its  sanctions  are  promises 
and  threats  which  are  to  be  fulfilled  in  a  future 
life,  and  which  leave  us  free  to  choose  and  de- 
termine, albeit  at  our  peril,  our  behavior  and 
conduct  in  this  life."* 

The  Church  is  not  a  substitute  for  conscience, 
but  a  help  for  the  forming  and  guidance  of  our 
judgment,  and  it  cannot  without  stultification 
appeal  to  my  private  judgment  to  accept  its 
authority  and  teaching,  and  with  the  same 
voice  declare  that  I  have  no  right  to  a 
private  judgment.  First  of  all,  there  is  no  other 
than  a  private  or  individual  judgment.  What- 
ever law  or  canon  has  been  passed  in  general  or 
provincial  councils  was  made  by  the  action  of 
individuals  giving  each  his  own  judgment,  and 
the  decree  of  the  council  is  the  aggregated  and 
formulated  opinion  of  its  members. 

There  is  no  other  way  possible  for  a  society 
or  a  church  to  make  and  set  forth  its  decisions. 
The  early  Christian  Church  did  not  receive  the 
faith  all  at  once,  as  something  let  down  out  of 
heaven  from  God.    The  Church  is  older  than  its 

*Seabury,  Sermons,  p.  12. 


128  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

books,  no  doubt,  and  they  were  written  by  dif- 
ferent men,  at  different  times  and  places,  to  the 
Church  and  for  the  Church,  and  to  be  handed 
down  and  witnessed  and  interpreted  by  the 
Church;  but  not  for  the  purpose  of  compelUng 
the  judgment  and  smothering  the  conscience  of 
its  members.  On  the  contrary,  the  books  them- 
selves declare  that  men  shall  prove  all  things, 
hold  fast  the  good,  reject  the  evil,  learn  of  the 
doctrine,  and  give  answers  for  their  faith  and 
hope.  The  difference  between  the  Apostles,  es- 
pecially between  St.  Peter  and  St.  Paul,  about 
things  which  were  not  essential,  indeed,  but  which 
were  certainly  regarded  by  them  and  others  as 
important,  is  plain  and  positive  proof  that  indi- 
vidual judgment  was  not  to  be  arbitrarily  sup- 
pressed and  conscience  dethroned. 

And  yet  this  is  precisely  what  is  aimed  at  by 
that  branch  of  the  Church  which  sets  up  its  own 
authority  as  supreme  over  the  judgment  and 
conscience  of  its  members.  That  it  does  this  is 
confessed  by  its  own  writers  and  is  known  by  all 
who  have  examined  the  subject.  The  supremacy 
of  the  See  of  Rome  in  that  Church's  view  of  the 
essence  of  revealed  religion,  and  an  unreserved 
submission  to  that  See  is,  if  not  the  sum  total  of 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  I29 

religion,  one  of  the  greatest  Christian  virtues. 
The  rights,  Hberty  and  conscience  of  the  Christian 
are,  of  necessity,  merged  in  this  one  virtue  of  sub- 
mission. He  has  no  rights,  except  such  as  the  See 
consents  to  recognize.  He  has  no  Hberty  to  think 
or  act  except  as  that  See  allows  or  directs.  He 
has  no  right  and  no  rule  of  conscience  except 
such  as  Rome  prescribes.  He  must  be  absolutely 
passive  in  himself,  to  be  moved  only  b}/  the  hand 
of  the  Roman  See,  and  as  far  as  it  is  possible  for 
him,  he  must  make  himself,  to  use  Loyola's  ex- 
pression, "b.  corpse,  to  be  raised  only  by  the  power 
of  Rome." 

That  I  may  not  seem  extravagant,  I  quote 
the  words  of  Doctor  Newman  after  he  had 
given  his  adherence  to  the  Roman  Communion, 
in  his  book  on  Development :  ''Moreover  it  is  to 
be  borne  in  mind  that  as  the  essence  of  all  relig- 
ion is  authority  and  obedience,  so  the  distinction 
between  natural  and  revealed  religion  lies  in  this, 
that  the  one  has  a  subjective  authority  and  the 
other  objective.  Revelation  consists  in  the  mani- 
festation of  the  invisible  Divine  Power,  or  in  the 
substitution  of  the  voice  of  a  Lawgiver  for  the 
voice  of  conscience.  The  supremacy  of  con- 
science is  the  essence  of  natural  religon ;  the  su- 


130  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

premacy  of  Apostle  or  Pope  or  Church  or  Bishop 
is  the  essence  of  the  revealed;  and  when  such 
external  authority  is  taken  away  the  mind  falls 
back  again  upon  that  inward  guide  which  it  pos- 
sessed even  before  Revelation  was  vouchsafed. 
Thus  what  conscience  is  in  the  system  of  nature, 
such  is  the  voice  of  Scripture  or  of  the  Holy  See, 
as  we  may  determine  it,  in  the  system  of  revela- 
tion. It  may  be  objected  indeed  that  conscience 
is  not  infallible ;  it  is  true,  but  still  it  is  ever  to  be 
obeyed.  And  that  is  just  the  prerogative  which 
controversalists  assign  to  the  See  of  Rome ; 
it  is  not  in  all  cases  infallible  (written  before  the 
last  Vatican  Council),  but  it  has  even  in  all  cases 
a  claim  upon  our  obedience.  And  as  obedience 
to  conscience,  even  supposing  ourselves  ill  in- 
formed, tends  to  the  improvement  of  our  moral 
nature  and  ultimately  of  our  knowledge,  so  obedi- 
ence to  our  ecclesiastical  superior  may  subserve 
our  growth  in  illumination  and  sanctity  even 
though  he  should  command  what  is  extreme  or 
inexpedient,  or  what  is  external  to  his  legitimate 
province." 

All  this  means  beyond  question  that  in  the  view 
of  the  writer  and  of  the  Church  in  which  he  be- 
came a  Cardinal  every  Christian  man  is  under 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  I3I 

obligations  to  surrender  both  his  judgment  and 
his  conscience  to  the  authority  of  the  Roman  See. 

Ignatius  Loyola,  in  his  letter  on  Obedience, 
says,  "There  is  an  end  of  the  glorious  simplicity 
of  blind  obedience  when  we  question  with  our- 
selves whether  the  commands  of  our  Superior  be 
right  or  not,  an  end  of  humility  also,  since  though 
on  the  one  hand  we  obey,  yet  on  the  other  we  put 
ourselves  above  our  Superior."  Each  of  these 
two  acute  minds  saw  plainly  enough  that  the 
supremacy  of  an  external  authority  and  the  su- 
premacy of  conscience  could  not  coexist.  The 
conscience  must  either  be  supreme  or  die. 

Logically,  therefore,  we  must  all  take  our 
choice  between  a  blind  submission  to  absolute 
authority  that  pretends  to  be  infallible  and  the 
conscientious  employment  of  such  means  of  ar- 
riving at  truth  as  God  has  blessed  us  with. 

In  conclusion,  if  blind  obedience  or  servile 
submission  in  religion  is  the  duty  God  most  de- 
sires of  us,  then  the  noblest  faculties  with  which 
He  has  been  pleased  to  endow  us,  curiosity,  the 
longing  to  know  more  of  Himself,  are  quite  su- 
perfluous and  positively  injurious.  Then  every 
new  discovery  that  affects  religion  is  an  error 
until  its  credentials  have  been  passed  upon  by  the 


132  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

proper  authority,  when  it  suddenly  becomes  a 
truth.  In  that  case,  the  most  dangerous  men  in 
the  world  are  the  prophets  of  all  times,  with  their 
contempt  for  established  opinion  and  custom,  and 
their  great  original  thoughts  of  God.  Rome,  at 
all  events,  for  five  hundred  years  has  been  obliged 
to  burn  and  excommunicate  all  of  her  prophets 
whom  she  could  not  stifle.  The  new  truths  which 
her  sons  have  given  to  the  world  have  been  atoned 
for  by  their  blood  and  by  their  life's  happiness. 
Not  even  the  pious  Lenormant  could  escape. 

It  is  easy  for  Roman  Catholic  writers  to  draw 
a  dark  picture  of  the  license  of  unbridled  indi- 
vidual judgment,  and  to  point  triumphantly  to  a 
divided  Christendom  torn  to  pieces  by  contend- 
ing sects.  That,  they  say,  is  the  result  of  liberty 
of  conscience  and  of  taking  the  most  mysterious 
book  in  the  world,  which  no  two  persons  interpret 
in  the  same  way,  as  the  source  of  authority.  A 
certain  part  of  this  accusation  is  true.  Man  is 
essentially  an  imperfect  being.  He  passes  from 
one  extreme  to  another.  Never  is  life  symmetri- 
cal and  equally  developed  on  all  sides.  But  God 
protects  us  from  too  much  error  by  making  error 
short-lived.  There  comes  a  point  in  the  action 
of  the  human  mind  beyond  which  vagary  cannot 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  I33 

go.  That  point  has  long  been  reached  in  Protes- 
tant Christianity.  The  Bible  can  no  longer  be 
made  to  mean  anything  one  wishes  it  to  mean. 
Sects,  far  from  multiplying,  for  the  past  hun- 
dred years  have  shown  a  tendency  to  diminish. 
At  present  there  is  an  unmistakable  desire  on  the 
part  of  the  great  orthodox  bodies  of  Protestant- 
ism to  draw  together.  It  was  only  natural  after 
long  ages  of  stern  repression  that  the  human  con- 
science, suddenly  set  free,  at  first  should  have 
abused  its  liberty.  At  the  same  time  the  fact  re- 
mains that  during  these  centuries  of  ferment 
humanity  has  advanced  with  gigantic  strides.  The 
only  period  of  similar  growth  within  the  history 
of  Christianity  is  the  first  three  centuries,  when 
the  Fathers  were  philosophers  and  the  Church 
was  free  as  air.  What  organization  has  lost, 
humanity  has  gained  a  hundred  times. 

Those  persons  who  imagine  that  civilization  is 
about  to  allow  itself  to  abandon  the  fields  in 
which  it  has  reaped  its  golden  harvest,  and  to  be 
led  back  to  the  school  whose  tyranny  it  has 
escaped,  are  the  victims  of  a  strange  illusion. 
Humanity  will  continue  to  develop,  and  the  Church 
will  develop  with  it.  But  our  supreme  dogma, 
at  least  in  all  things  pertaining  to  the  mind,  is 


134  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

liberty.  In  point  of  fact  the  Church  of  Rome,  as 
a  world  power  ruled  by  one  centre,  was  built 
strictly  on  the  model  of  the  old  Roman  Empire. 
Its  superb  organization  owes  its  inception  to  the 
genius  of  Julius  Caesar  and  the  great  Roman 
lawyers  who  planned  the  Empire.  Now  the  po- 
litical theory  on  which  that  vast  aggregation  of 
power  was  reared  was  that  the  citizen  exists  for 
the  State,  the  individual  must  be  sacrificed  to  the 
organization — a  conception  which  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  race  has  absolutely  rejected,  the  very  con- 
tradiction of  the  view  of  life  entertained  by  Jesus 
Christ.  That  harsh  theory  the  Roman  Catholic 
Church  has  carried  out  to  the  letter.  By  ruth- 
lessly sacrificing  individual  genius  and  goodness, 
by  silencing  every  protesting  voice,  by  forbid- 
ding men  to  think  and  by  keeping  the  larger  part 
of  humanity  almost  in  the  condition  of  imbecility, 
she  has  managed  to  preserve  her  superb  organiza- 
tion unbroken  for  a  thousand  years.  But  the  bet- 
ter part  of  the  world  will  no  longer  tolerate  those 
annihilating  conditions.  Humanity  refuses  to  lie 
any  longer  in  that  Procrustean  bed.  Better  a 
divided  Christianity  than  a  Christianity  which 
has  forgotten  Christ. 

Is  the  principle  of    external    authority  with- 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  1 35 

out  value  in  religion,  and  is  everything  to  be  left 
to  the  vagaries  of  individual  judgment?  I  do  not 
think  so;  practically  that  is  impossible.  Push 
individualism  as  far  as  you  please,  individual 
judgments  unite  and  a  new  source  of  authority 
is  formed,  and  underlying  all  our  individual  opin- 
ions is  the  authority  of  Jesus  Christ  on  which  the 
faith  of  the.  Church  rests  more  absolutely  than 
ever  before.  To  tell  the  truth,  every  great  relig- 
ion has  contained  within  itself  these  two  undying 
elements — authority  and  organization  on  the  one 
side,  and  liberty  and  personal  inspiration  on  the 
other.  Beside  Israel's  bold,  iconoclastic  Seers, 
who  were  scarcely  more  than  deists,  stood  the 
Law  of  Moses,  without  which  they  would  have 
disrupted  the  Hebrew  Church  in  a  few  years. 
Their  personal  convictions,  which  were  largely 
negative,  could  never  become  the  religion  of  the 
people.  Beside  the  daring  idealism  of  the  Upani- 
shads  stand  the  Laws  of  Manu,  w^hich  organized 
life  in  its  least  details.  In  our  own  Church  there 
is  the  party  called  "High"  on  the  one  side,  and 
the  party  called  ''Broad,"  its  only  true  antagonist, 
on  the  other.  Out  of  the  conflict  of  these  two 
opposing  principles  comes  progress.  The  thesis 
reconciled  with  the  thesis  antithesis  produces  the 


136  A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE. 

sjnthesis,  that  is  to  say,  another  step  toward  per- 
fection. 

The  lower  the  mental  capacity  of  any  people 
^e  more  that  people  stands  in  need  of  authority. 
Without  capacity  for  self-direction,  obedience 
to  superior  intelligence  is  its  only  safety.  That 
is  a  thought  always  to  be  borne  in  mind  in  judg- 
ing the  Roman  Catholic  Church.  If  all  humanity 
fead  reached  the  elevation  of  its  highest  mem- 
bers the  Roman  Catholic  Church  would  cease  to 
exist.  As  it  is,  the  Roman  Church  is  doing  an 
incalculable  work  for  humanity,  a  work  which 
no  other  Church  in  Christendom  is  capable  of 
doing.  It  is  a  great  mistake  to  suppose  that  all 
persons  find  inspiration  and  salvation  in  the  same 
way.  Thoughts  full  of  blessedness  to  one  man 
may  mean  nothing,  or  even  be  injurious  to  an- 
other. As  long  as  the  present  disparity  between 
individuals  continues  it  is  improbable  that  any 
organized  Church  can  be  devised  which  would 
satisfy  such  diverse  needs.  Therefore  churches, 
like  propositions,  must  expect  to  lose  extensively 
as  they  gain  intensively.  With  every  wish  on  the 
Omrch's  part  to  be  honest,  those  who  are  without 
must  be  taught,  if  they  are  to  be  taught  at  all, 
hy  parables;  and  until  these  belated  consciences 


A  STUDY  OF  CONSCIENCE.  I37 

learn  the  lesson  of  self-direction,  they  must  he 
directed.  But  the  Church  which  appeals  to  minds 
of  the  better  order  is  the  Church  which,  while 
holding  fast  to  the  great  Christian  verities,  aind 
while  retaining  the  classical  and  incomparable 
forms  of  devotion,  gives  the  freest  play  to  in- 
dividual genius  and  inspiration;  in  other  words, 
it  is  the  Church  in  which  these  two  eternal  ele- 
ments, conservatism  and  progress,  respect  for 
tradition  and  liberty,  are  most  justly  united. 


Date  Due 

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